171: Chapter 171 I'm not targeting anyone in particular, everyone here is a hot potato.

Lu Yaoguang also lost her composure for a brief moment.

She reached out and took the prototype. When her fingertips touched the body, she paused noticeably.

Light.

Much lighter than she had imagined.

She flipped it over, then flipped it back, and finally, her fingertips couldn't help but touch the small module that had just popped up from the top.

The touch was cool, and the craftsmanship was incredibly exquisite.

"This look..."

Her voice dropped by half a tone.

"This front view isn't just strong."

"It's absurd."

She looked up at Lu Li, her tone far more serious than usual.

"Brother, the entire industry is still patching things up with waterdrop, notch, and hole-punch designs."

"Once this thing comes out, the previous batch of flagships will instantly look old."

"Not the kind of old where it's just one generation behind."

"It's the kind of old that makes people think, 'So everything I was using before was just a half-finished product.'"

Lu Li leaned against the desk, his tone still devoid of any fluctuation.

"Pretty much."

"At the very least, at the moment of the launch event, the competitors' designs will look very ugly."

Wang Peng was currently in a state of "soul out-of-body but body still functioning." He held the phone, looking at it from left to right, his thick-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose without him even bothering to push them back up.

"Brother."

His voice carried a religious-like reverence.

"You're not making a phone."

"You're issuing a critical condition notice to the competition."

Lu Li glanced at him but didn't speak.

This damn fatty was actually quite accurate sometimes.

"Don't get excited yet."

He raised his hand and switched the screen on the tablet.

The rendering on the large screen flipped to the back.

This time, Wang Peng and Lu Yaoguang both went quiet simultaneously.

The design language of the rear camera module was very restrained, even bordering on low-key.

There were no exaggerated rings, no cluttered matrix arrangements. The way the entire module was embedded into the body was clean and sharp, as if it had grown there naturally.

But on this excessively low-key back, there was a line of parameters quietly lying in the bottom right corner of the camera module.

20X.

That is, 20x optical zoom.

The air in the study seemed to have been hit with a pause button.

Wang Peng adjusted his glasses.

He first thought he had misread it.

Then he looked at it again.

Then his whole expression was like a computer that had just been unplugged and plugged back in—first the screen went black, then it flickered, and finally, it lit up suddenly.

"Brother..."

"Is this real or fake?"

"Fake." Lu Li said casually, "I made a picture just to trick you for fun."

"..."

Wang Peng swallowed.

His brain had already started running automatically.

At 12 years old, the foundation he had built from watching hundreds of hours of teardown videos wasn't for nothing.

"20x optical... the equivalent focal length must be at least four or five hundred millimeters..."

He muttered subconsciously, his eyes widening more and more.

"With this body thickness, you can't fit such a long lens assembly... unless you use a folded prism... but how many folds? How do you control light path loss? What about dispersion? How about distortion correction?"

The more he calculated, the more wrong it felt.

According to the supply chain and optical solutions he knew about, this parameter was simply impossible to achieve under current manufacturing conditions.

Yet, his cousin had made it.

And looking at the thickness of that prototype, it hadn't even increased significantly.

At this moment, Wang Peng suddenly felt a sensation he had never experienced before.

It wasn't the worship of "My cousin is so amazing."

It was the bewilderment of "I can't even analyze the principle behind his brilliance."

That kind of bewilderment, the impact it had on a conceited honor student, was far more violent than simple shock.

"Holy crap..."

His voice was weak.

"Pop-up camera... 20x optical zoom..."

"Brother, are you making phones or missiles?"

Lu Yaoguang didn't bother to keep her composure this time either.

She stared at that string of parameters for several seconds, her mind racing not with technical principles, but with marketing visuals.

She almost reflexively thought of a scene—the launch event, the big screen switching in real-time to the phone's camera feed, shooting from the stage to the faces of the audience in the very last row.

Clear.

Every single strand of hair, clearly visible.

The live stream's chat would crash the server within three seconds.

"20x optical..."

She said softly.

"What does that even mean?"

"From this window, could you take a picture of what the security guard at the gate is eating for lunch today?"

Lu Li twitched his mouth.

"Depends on if his bowl is big enough."

Lu Yaoguang wasn't amused by this remark.

She knew all too well what the words "optical zoom" meant.

It wasn't software algorithm cropping and zooming.

It wasn't digital zoom that turned distant views into a blurry mosaic.

It was the hardware capability of the lens itself.

After zooming in, the details remained, the texture remained, and the image wouldn't collapse into a surveillance screenshot.

And in the 2018 flagship market, telephoto capabilities were generally still struggling at the level of two or three times optical zoom.

The loudest selling points touted at everyone's launch events were "Night Mode" and "Multi-frame Synthesis."

Her brother just threw a 20x out there.

This wasn't called leading.

This was called changing the playing field.

Lu Li looked at her expression and knew she was already rehearsing the launch event in her mind.

"If a top-tier phone isn't maxed out, what's the point of calling it top-tier?"

His tone was indifferent.

"And this is just the optical end."

"Stacking digital hybrid zoom on top, the magnification can go even further."

"200x is no problem, just do another round of algorithm optimization after shooting."

When Wang Peng heard the words "200x," his body swayed honestly.

"It can go even higher???"

"Wouldn't that be able to shoot the moon?"

"Shooting the moon isn't hard."

Lu Li glanced at him.

This sentence suddenly reminded him of a manufacturer in his previous life that used "shooting the moon" as the finale selling point of their launch event, making twenty pages of PPT slides, and getting a hundred thousand comments in the chat.

At that time, he was sitting in the lab watching the live stream, thinking: Is that it?

"Anyone can brag about shooting the moon."

He paused, his tone carrying a note of self-amused mockery that only he understood.

"Shooting Uranus, now that would be interesting."