Tecno teases dual periscope zoom lens for upcoming phone

Upstart Chinese tech brand Tecno had an impressive year in 2024, releasing two foldable phones, several flagship tablets, and a handheld gaming device that won multiple awards.

To close out the year, the company held its fourth annual Future Lens event in Chongqing, where the Shenzhen-based company showed off three new camera-centric features called the “Tecno Image Matrix” architecture A full-end image processing pipeline; a new camera sensor designed for capturing fast-moving objects, called “EVS Dynamic Snapshot”; and a dual periscope zoom lens, embarrassingly named “Tap Any Zoom Dual Prism” Telephoto”.

I use the word “teased” rather than “released” for these features because they aren't ready in Tecno's consumer devices yet; these are just announcements. But Xiaohan Huang, Tecno's director of imaging and R&D centers, promised that they would arrive in Tecno devices in 2025.

Tenox Image Matrix

Tecno Image Matrix essentially rearranges the data pipeline so that each step from initial acquisition to final image receives the best AI processing and algorithms before moving on to the next step.

Without any physical equipment to test, I can't vouch for the effectiveness of this new pipeline.

EVS dynamic snapshot

Next is EVS Dynamic Snapshot, which pairs an event-based vision sensor (EVS) with a traditional CMOS camera sensor to capture moving objects.

The EVS sensor does not collect pixels frame by frame like traditional camera sensors, but captures motion data through a complete dynamic process, while the camera sensor captures still images and color information. Tecno claims that the data from the two sensors are then combined, and the end result is a clear, still image of a fast-moving object. I must add that this type of ultra-fast shutter has been seen in Huawei and Vivo smartphones, but Tecno's implementation on the EVS sensor seems to be more ambitious.

Click on any zoom biprism telephoto

What I'm most excited about is this feature: dual periscope zoom lenses. The periscope zoom lens is one of the most important smartphone camera hardware breakthroughs in the modern smartphone era. It essentially places the camera lens on the side of the phone body, providing image information through a series of magnifying glasses before reaching the image signal. More space processors. The technology was first launched by Huawei and Oppo in 2019, and now Tecno is promising a lens with two such periscopes.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the Tecno Image Matrix is, but I'm excited about the dual periscope lens, which I think is the technology most likely to be useful immediately upon release next year. I've tested nearly every Tecno flagship over the past three years, and I've seen steady improvements in the company's cameras. In fact, the retractable telephoto lens on the Tecno Phantom X2 phone remains one of the best telephoto lenses I've ever tested.

Tecno will be at Mobile World Congress in February, and I suspect we'll see one of the technologies there.