Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Which there hasn't been any indication since that they really are putting energy behind it. Let's talk about image sensing because that, I think, is a really good story. That's an amazing story. Continuing their arms dealer strategy, I think, as they realize how bad they were going to be at making cell phones, there was a thing that was happening that started 15, 20 years before, which was innovating on sensors, in particular, camera sensors. This was really beneficial for their PowerShot line. This was really beneficial for all of their pro end cameras. They kind of invented the mirrorless segment, the Sony Alpha—I hate this word but it's so applicable here—the prosumer concept of like, hey, people want a reasonably compact thing with interchangeable lenses that they can take out that isn't a big gigantic SLR. All of that work led them to have tons of breakthroughs, tons of patents on how to get the smallest most effective image sensor. They, I think, are now the sole supplier to the iPhone for the little sensor that enables all the cool computational photography stuff that's going on. They have something like 50% market share in the image sensor market broadly. They are able to put sensors in lots and lots of other phones too, it's not just the iPhone. When you think back to, I think the announcement was the iPhone 4, when cell phone cameras turned from camera phones to like, whoa, these are actually becoming pretty good cameras, that was Sony. There's a ton of engineering and software that's been done on top of that now, especially, as you know, people like Apple design their own silicon and have a really tight image processing pipeline. I think in 2009, Sony was the first to create this commercially viable back-illuminated CMOS sensor. That enabled things like low light photography. There are a lot of rumors around the next generation that'll be in the iPhone 14 and 15 that are totally unbelievable like gigantic step-function changes in the number of megapixels and the image you're able to get per size of pixel. There's supposedly really, really great stuff to come over the next couple of years purely on Sony's innovations in the sensors. That's such a good success story of making back to the original Sony like, here's something that people want that is like, this is going to work in the market and then you learn and grow from that.…

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