Zoran Announces COACH-14 Camera Processor

Market Wire: Zoran announced that its COACH 14 camera processor is available to qualified manufacturers of 3D, Full HD video, hybrid and interchangeable-lens cameras.

The 1080p video sometimes suffers from video artifacts introduced by the in-sensor binning of the high-megapixel sensor data. Zoran's COACH 14 SoC is said to eliminate this problem by processing the raw sensor data to create a crisp, full resolution, full-color video stream.

Feature list:

• Supports Full HD, H.264, multi-stream compression.
• CMOS Rolling-Shutter Correction Technology
• Digital Video Stabilization based on digital motion analysis technology that eliminates the need for a gyro, saving manufacturing costs.
• New set of lens correction technologies
• Motion Compensated Temporal Filter which reduces noise and improves low-light performance while eliminating blur due to object motion.
• Dual-sensor support for 3D still and video encoding as well as a direct connection to 3DTVs via an HDMI 1.4 port.

Zoran's COACH processors power digital still and video camera models from Casio, Fujifilm, GE, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung, Sony, and Vivitar among others. The COACH 14 is currently available to qualified digital camera manufacturers and is being designed into multiple camera models that are planned for production in Q1 2012.

"Adoption of CMOS sensors is accelerating in the digital camera market because they support faster capture speeds and higher quality 1080p video. In 2013, CMOS sensors are forecast to overtake CCD sensors with 70 million CMOS sensors shipping to market versus 65 million CCD sensors," according to Tetsuo Omori, analyst at Techno Systems Research.