Recently, DXOMARK held an industry seminar in Shanghai, officially announcing the launch of a new service, DXOMARK Insights, and announced that the first phase of DXOMARK Insights will focus on skin tone rendering for mobile phone images. Hotspot participated in the conference and interviewed Mr. Hervé Macudzinski, Director of Image Quality Evaluation at DXOMARK.
According to DXOMARK, DXOMARK Insights aims to help consumers find the pain points of product experience, and give data and reference to the entire industry in terms of product performance requirements from the perspective of consumers. In DXOMARK Insights, DXOMARK combines its technical expertise, research data, and feedback from consumer groups to derive insights.
DXOMARK said it has done its first round of research on DXOMARK Insight skin tone rendering in Paris, with consumers of different skin tones and cultural backgrounds, as well as industry experts and professional photographers. Based on DXOMARK's research on skin tone rendering, DXOMARK hopes to better define the future development trend of smartphone imaging technology.
DXOMARK also revealed some details about the process of DXOMARK Insight Skin Tone Rendering, such as setting up a solution for blind comparison of research subjects, using a research method to measure quality based on differences in user preferences, and investigating professional rendering in imaging tests to obtain evaluations and suggestions from professional photography dimensions.
Director of Image Quality Evaluation, DXOMARK: Hervé Macudzinski
We also spoke with Hervé Macudzinski, Director of Image Quality Evaluation at DXOMARK, to learn more about DXOMARK Insights.
*Question: Why did DXO start working on skin tone rendering now?OEM manufacturers have been studying the skin tone rendering and beautification track for many years, why did DXO choose to cut into the track at this time?
DXOMARK: Actually, we've been paying attention to skin tone rendering for a long time, and when we released the fifth edition of our test protocol last year, we did a consumer survey, and portrait shooting was already a very popular and highly used scenario.
OEMs' research on skin tone rendering and beauty cameras has also raised consumers' expectations for images. Today's consumers are likely to be more specific and demanding in the portrait scenarios they use the most.
Skin tone rendering is very important for portrait shooting at the moment, and there are some technical challenges, which is why we paid attention to this topic and started to dive into it. We didn't do skin tone rendering research just to explore how to solve the problem of dark skin tone rendering, but to serve a more diverse audience of skin tones.
*Question: Domestic mobile phone manufacturers do not pay much attention to portrait skin color, and focus more on the blur and beautification of portrait shooting. Will DXOMARK make a set of evaluation criteria for portrait blur and beautification in the future?
DXOAMRK: In the future, we will conduct research in China to learn about the preferences of Chinese consumers and the performance of Chinese smartphones. If we later found that beauty is a very important part of consumers' attention in our research and testing in China, then of course we will add more consideration to the benchmark. If beauty is very popular in a specific group, then we will study and consider its image and weight from the perspective of a specific group.
*Question: What are the main insights of DXOMARK Insights?How often do you get insights?Do you have any plans for the next edition of DXOMARK Insights?
DXOMARK: We've been successfully conducting a study on skin tone rendering in Paris since June, and we plan to extend DXOMARK insights to more users, more cultures, and more geographies.
We plan to conduct research on the Indian market at the beginning of next year, and we hope to implement this project in China as soon as possible. We also hope to promote DXOMARK insights in Southeast Asia and Africa, where the challenges of skin tone rendering are high and the market demand is very high.
Next, DXOMARK will focus on the topic of HDR, because HDR is a relatively big challenge for the industry in terms of both image and screen display.
DXOMARK Insights takes about 4-5 months each time, including the selection of samples, such as this time our sample of survey respondents includes not only consumers, but also industry experts and professional photographers.
*Question: At present, many manufacturers cooperate with Leica or Zeiss, and they have also formed very stylized imaging characteristics, how will DXOAMRK consider these styles in the testing process?Also, are there any mobile phone manufacturers who will seek DXOMARK's review opinions to improve their portrait shooting?
DXOMARK: Imaging style doesn't affect our assessment of image quality and consumer preference. We also believe that different manufacturers can certainly have the freedom to define their style, and our evaluation is more from the perspective of image quality and consumers.
In fact, we work with the whole industry, including different manufacturers. However, the content of the cooperation is different, some provide benchmark-based evaluations, and some we provide a turnkey turnkey turnkey laboratory.
With regard to the DXOMARK Insights service, we also hope to be able to provide such a product and service to manufacturers, based on our extensive sample insights, to help manufacturers continuously optimize, inspect and improve their image quality and style.
In this DXOMARK insight, we have introduced a very important process, that is, in addition to using mobile phones to shoot samples, we will also use professional rendering, that is, photographer rendering, through professional cameras and ** editors to finally image, and then mix in the research samples. By doing so, we can bring in the insights of professional photographers to help us build a more diverse, complete and integrated perspective.
In addition to DXOMARK's insight into skin tone rendering, DXOMAR also announced that it is now officially online with a custom ranking function, which allows users to check the features they care about according to their preferences for the model to get a more personalized list that suits them.