Multi-camera smartphones: Benefits and challenges
Posted on February 21, 2019 by David Cardinal
Reading Time: 15 min read
With the growing importance of camera performance to smartphone makers and users, manufacturers have worked hard to add features and to improve image quality. However, users also want thin phones, which greatly limits the size of the individual camera modules that can be used. The small Z-height, as the industry refers to the thickness of a phone, has caused designers to make use of the larger width and height of phones by adding additional cameras to their designs.
Having multiple cameras has made an array of new features possible—zoom, better HDR, portrait modes, 3D, and low-light photography—but it has also presented new challenges. We’ll take a look at how multiple camera phones have evolved, at how they’ve improved the photo experience for phone owners, and at the challenges that phone makers have had to tackle to make them work. In each case, it is important to keep in mind that it is still early in the development of multiple-camera smartphones, so expect to see rapid progress in the technology and the features it enables over the coming years.
Telephoto and zoom
Until the introduction and market success of the Apple iPhone 7 Plus in 2016, zooming in on a smartphone was almost always entirely digital. Starting with Samsung’s Galaxy S4 and S5 Zoom, a few specialized phones had an optical zoom (made possible by their bulky design), but most popular models offered only a limited-quality, digital zoom capability that used some combination of cropping and post-capture resizing.
The physics of lens design make it very complex to fit a zoom lens into the thin body of a high-end smartphone. So over the last two years, almost all flagship phones have moved to a dual-lens-and-sensor design for their rear-facing camera instead of trying to add an optical zoom. Most—including Apple, OnePlus, HTC, Xiaomi, Motorola, Nokia and Vivo models—use a traditional camera module paired with a 2x telephoto module, although the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and P20 Pro make use of a 3x telephoto.
0 Comments