Why ‘Ciri’ might be the first Chromebook tablet with a great camera

I’ve made this sort of proclamation about devices in the past, so I do want to be careful with what I’m about to say. However, overwhelming evidence points to ‘Ciri’ – the upcoming Chromebook tablet powered by the newly-announced MediaTek Kompanio 838 – likely having a vastly-improved camera experience compared with past Chromebook devices.

Now, that being said, I also recognize that talking about past Chromebook camera experiences sets a very, very low bar. Even on tablets like the Duet 5 and Duet 3 that have decent sensors, the camera experience is not something you’d want to use on any sort of a regular basis for anything outside of scanning documents or video calls. So, when I say we may see some big improvements, you do have to keep this in mind as the start of the comparison.

3 reasons I think the cameras for ‘Ciri’ may be special

First up, we came across commits for ‘Ciri’s cameras many months ago, and that was the beginning of hope that we may finally have a decent camera setup on a Chromebook tablet for once. That post went live about 14 months ago, and with the sensors being tested for ‘Geralt’ (the base board for ‘Ciri’) already existing in phone cameras, we were able to see what this particular hardware is capable of in real-world use.

Next up, we have tons and tons of commits in the Chromium Repositories that center around libcamera for ‘Ciri’. Clearly wanting to know more about what libcamera is, I did a quick search and found this from the official libcamera site:

A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS

Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific closed-source solution.

To address this problem the Linux media community is collaborating with the industry to develop a camera stack that is open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born out of that collaboration and offers modern camera support to Linux-based systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.

Don’t get me wrong: libcamera has been used in other Chromebooks, but I’ve not seen the sheer volume of commits for a single development board with libcamera-related changes the way I have for ‘Ciri’. On any given day, a search for new changes on the ‘Ciri’ board can look like this:

That’s a ton of action for a Chromebook camera, and when you add all this activity in the Chromium Gerrit to a device that clearly has some solid hardware to work with, it becomes pretty evident that there’s a good chance this camera could be special.

But the final piece of this puzzle came courtesy of MediaTek’s big Kompanio 838 announcement and the info that was provided in that press release. While I’m excited for the on-device AI abilities, the battery life and likely high-performance of this chip, I was very intrigued by the fact that a good portion of the infographic provided by MediaTek focused on the camera abilities that reside in the Kompanio 838.

Touted as a “Premium imaging processor for cameras,” MediaTek’s Imagiq 7 series ISP “gives photos and videos more true-to-life colors, even in challenging lighting conditions.” With support for 4K webcams, upgraded HDR, low-light capture, and HEVC video encoding, this chip is clearly ready to power a much better camera system than what we generally see on a Chromebook.

Now, take that information, realize that ‘Geralt’ and ‘Ciri’ have been in constant development alongside this SoC since its introduction into development, and it doesn’t take much of a leap to realize this new Chromebook tablet should come bearing a camera setup that can deliver a far better experience than what we come accustomed to on ChromeOS.

Will the software be able to fully take advantage of this hardware? That much will be a question for later in the year when we expect to see ‘Ciri’. My money is on a Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 successor, and if it has all-day battery, laptop-like performance, a great screen, detachable keyboard, and now a fantastic camera, I think this could be a game-changing device all around when it does arrive. Fall can’t come soon enough!