I was hoping that someone came out with a camera that not only had not only sensors for visible light, but for infrared and UV. It's just another color to add to the sensors; I think we have enough megapixels, seems like going for other bands is reasonable.
I have a OnePlus 8 Pro with an IR camera. It's pretty nifty - nature photography looks cool, seeing through stovetops is neat (and seeing when they heat up), and VR things are also often playing around with IR (plastic transparent to IR, IR LEDs, etc).
I ended up having to flash Lineage, as there was some outrage that in a highly limited set of circumstances, thin see-through T-shirts became slightly more see-through and OnePlus disabled that camera in their later firmware updates.
You have to love when amazing innovations disappear just in case the lowest-quality rung of our society might misuse something... I'm pretty sick of being ruled based on the lowest common denominator.
Back when I was in oil and gas, we were thinking of using modified mirror less cameras without and IR filter for vegetation density calculations. There were a few vendors that sold the UAVs and modified cameras.
Nowadays, there is a more mature ecosystem, with specialized drone mapping cameras tailored for the purpose.
For our use case, the micasense rededge would have been perfect.
CMOS image sensors are naturally sensitive to near IR. Early feature phones had no IR filters on their cameras - you could see an IR remote light up through them. But as people became more and more obsessed with smartphone camera quality, smartphones started to ship with those filters too. You get more "lifelike" colors that way.
Although in some multi-camera smartphones, one of the secondary cameras may lack an IR filter.
One of mine definitely lacks such a filter because I was able to catch not only the remote, but also an electric stovetop while it was still heating up and its glow was barely visible with the naked eye.
Pretty much all digital cameras and phones see a bright enough source like an IR remote LED. Filters don't remove the radiation, they just turn it down.
iPhones also have a near-IR front camera, but that one is fully slaved to the FaceID system. Don't think anything in userland can access raw data from it.
Those rely on the depth maps, which can be accessed from userspace. But the depth maps are derived from IR camera footage, which is not accessible.
Ironically, older iPhones have better depth resolving capability overall. Apple sacrificed depth sensing performance in favor of smaller unit size in the newer ones.
