With the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Note10 on the market, we started hearing a concept called audio zoom or audio zoom. Although this functionality already existed before the arrival of the previous device, the truth is that it was with the arrival of this device that the concept became popular.
Ma what is audio zoom? This is one of the coolest features of a smartphone and, despite the name, it is related to video recording. If you are still interested in learning more about this concept, join us.
What is audio zoom?
Let's take the example that DxOMark gives us. We are at a party or in a place with many people and we want to register one or more people in particular. We turn on the smartphone camera, zoom in with it and suddenly and as if by magic, the sound around us disappears and the mobile phone only captures the sounds of the people we are focusing on. For example, very useful in a concert where we want to record only the singer.
As we said, this is nothing new, phones from years ago like the LG G2 or HTC 11 there they already had but Samsung and its good marketing policy were to come to make it known to the whole world. By the way, the iPhone 11 also has this feature, as does the new Note20 among many other current high-end terminals.
Let's say, therefore, that the audio zoom [allows you to focus on a specific sound focus, attenuating the rest of the sounds coming from other directions, all thanks to the zoom of the camera, as you can see from the short video that we have added a few lines above.
How does it work?
Difference in how one smartphone without audio zoom captures sounds and another with
Thanks to omnidirectional microphones. The more microphones the phone has and the further away they are, the better the sound is received. In the image above and clearly you can see how this system works.
When zooming with the camera, these microphones focus on objects that are in focus, picking up all the sound from that direction and ignoring the rest.
Why is it so important?
Thanks to the evolution of smartphone cameras, audio zoom is much more precise than before
Like noise cancellation, this technology was developed during World War II for military purposes, though today is used with technological advances.
The fact that smartphones have audio zoom opens up a whole world of possibilities in the multimedia sector and will allow cell phones to be a much more comprehensive tool for recording video.
While audio zoom hasn't undergone major improvements in recent years, the drastic changes in smartphones have made it more and more a much more precise and effective technology. The truth is, we'll have to see how far this feature can go in the future, eager to know what it will bring
