An interesting thing is that while the pop-up camera trend has been limited to smartphones and is still alien to tablets or laptops, Huawei’s sub-brand Honor is taking a giant leap and adding a pop-up camera to its upcoming smart TV. Just like the Honor 9X, Honor’s first smart TV will have a pop-up camera and a 55-inch display.
Honor recently announced that it is looking to enter the lucrative television market and launch its first Honor smart TV which will come with a few interesting industry firsts. Its TV set to be unveiled on August 9 during the Huawei Developer Conference where we’ll learn more about EMUI 10.
Last week, speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in China, Honor president George Zhao revealed details about its upcoming Honor Vision TV. He hinted key details about the upcoming smart TV, including the onboard processor as well as its capabilities.
The company has announced that the Honor Vision TV which will feature the Honghu 818 intelligent chipset instead of a Kirin SoC like many Huawei and Honor products. The all-new Hongu 818 chipset is an AI chip developed in a partnership between Huawei and Baidu specifically for smart screen products.
The company also talked about a new concept under the name “Sharp Tech” under which it will bring new cutting-edge technologies in the future.
As for the features, the Honor TV will use a pop-up AI selfie camera aided by a special HiSilicon NPU chip, and will also bring with it face recognition capabilities. These are expected to help in providing high-quality video calling using the TV.
The chip is said to help aid the performance of the TV and also improve color accuracy. It will also be used in high dynamic range imaging (HDR), super-segmentation (SR), noise reduction (NR), dynamic contrast enhancement (DCI), and automatic color management (ACM). As revealed by Honor, the chip also supports 8K/30fps or 4K/120fps playback.
Additionally, the chip supports 64MP image decoding, local dimming among other features.
The new chipset will also be used by Huawei to improve the surround sound experience. Reports from sources say that Honor’s new TV will come running HongMeng OS, which was earlier being pegged as an Android competitor but is now emerging as an IoT solution for multiple devices across Honor and Huawei’s portfolio of products.
The Honor Vision TV will also have support for far-field voice recognition, hinting that there will be some sort of voice control or smart assistant built-in. The feature should work without any remote controller with an inbuilt microphone.
The 55-inch display is already listed on the Chinese e-commerce website JD.com. The listing page reveals some key information about it such as graphic which shows a rising camera above the smart TV.
Despite the launch not being until next month, Zhao announced that the 55-inch Honor Vision TV could be reserved for 9,999 yuan (approximately $1,453 USD) on JD.com.
With the details provided by Zhao, it’s safe to say that this 55-inch smart screen with a pop-up camera is going to be a new face of the television market. Although there is no mention of whether the Honor Vision TV will retail in Kenya, we do expect to keep you updated on this.