Why there are phones with multiple cameras and what is their purpose?

Go to shopping for a smartphone these days and one in every of the options you’ll be preordained to pay the attention to, is the rear-facing camera, which can go with multiple lenses and may come with diverse features, pros and cons. Which might lead you up to scratching your head wondering, what in the fudge do these terms even mean. Dont worry, we’re going to discuss these exact things and you’ll be a “Lens expert" at the end of the article.

VNAY RVKR
7 min readMar 28, 2019

Each camera contains a lens for guiding light and a sensing element for capturing it, each of that have an effect on the standard of the the shot and how it looks. In recent years, manufactures have decided to add lot and a lot of lenses to the rear camera, sometimes so extreme that it no longer a phone with a camera, instead a camera with a phone, spawning designations like "dual-lens" and "triple-lens." The loftier end of the spectrum is obtained by phones like the Nokia nine PureView, that has multiple lenses, however, does the rule of the more the better, apply here? What specifically do these further lenses do? Let’s find out.

Here, we’ll answer that question and make a case for why discrete kind of lenses may be useful and why going for phone with fewer lenses, might not compromise the image quality and also get you a better deal.

Wide or ultra-angle lenses

Here’s a picture of Samsung camera with its ultra wide angle lenses, it must flash you the idea of what it really means to have a ultra wide angle lens on your smartphone.

Quite merely, these lenses have the ability to fit a lot of stuff happening within the single shot, whether or not it is a sweeping landscape or a row of friends' faces. they are the equivalent of taking a number of paces back with a regular camera therefore you get a lot of within the frame. Ultra- or super-wide lenses, of course, allow you to take a lot of figurative steps back.

{This is basic representation of distorted image}

A bit of distortion may creep into photos photos captured from the ultra-wide lens, however the most effective contemporary smartphones will createthe required changes to stay everything trying as natural as attainable, and make the shot cool, without messing or compromising with the quality of the image.

Some flagship phones currently feature ultra-wide lens, as well as the recently undraped Samsung Galaxy S10. lots of others (including the iPhone XS max) have a optical lens or 2, therefore it’s something you think, you need the most and care about it.

In the camera specs, look into focal length (measured in millimeters) and field of view (measured in degrees) to know what proportion goes is compatibly fit in the image captured. Lower focal lengths and better fields of view enable you to capture a lot of the scene. Some phones additionally come equipped with wide or ultra-wide lenses on the front for higher quality and vibrant group selfie images.

The science behind Telephoto lens

Telephoto lenses are almost equivalent to as of wide-angle lens considering their popularity and availability, however instead of obtaining amount of the scene within the shot, they permit for procurable optical zoom. The field of view on this lens is consricted on this sort of lens and is smaller than others, however by employing a Telephto camera lens with a second lens and a sensor (sensing element), your phone’s camera can come closer to the action, quality and lucid image without utilizing any moving components. On a regular photographic digital camera, as an example, you can see the lens extended because it was zoomed in.

Telephoto lenses also are are used to produce those fancy bokeh or focus effects in portrait mode. By combining the information from multiple lenses, your phone is capable to understand; how close the objects are, therefore it knows where to blur the background and transfer the foreground into focus.Some smart phone cameras analyze and adpt information from multiple lenses and succeed to throwing in some guesses or infact to be precisely creating smart guesses regarding what is within the foreground, a method which is typically adapted by the budget phones and also the single-lens, phones like Google pixel devices.

The highest quantity of true optical zoom you’ll presently get is 5x on the Huawei P30 professional, however some phones have hybrid systems that use each optical and digital zoom to stretch even nearer. Still others use software package tricks with one lens to closely mimic ths optical zoom quality (such as the Google pel 3).

Monochrome sensor

Monochrome sensing element or the sensor is cleverly adapted in the
Huawei P20 professional

A monochrome sensing element is enclosed within the Huawei P20 professional

Several smartphone cameras have a sensing element dedicated to taking monochrome shots. The advantage snd good thing about black-and-white photos is sharpness, that is why some photographers like pictures without any additional colours in them them. Mordern smartphones are sensible and “Smart" enough to mix that sharpness with info coming back through color sensors to supply a trial that’s, in theory, a lot and similar to that of the natural scene.

Still, the adaptation of the monochrome sensing element remains rare. Some Huawei and Honor phones use it, as do some Motorola and Nokia devices, however it isn’t one thing that is everywhere in the market.

Where a monochrome sensing element is enclosed, it will sometimes be isolated from alternative lenses to capture distinctive black-and-white photos of your travels. this selection are often found inside the camera app’s settings and if you are a fan of the format, it’s one thing to look about for.

Depth sensor

If you discover a phone with a depth sensing element, it’s designed to try and do specifically that—sense depth. this suggests professional-style blur effects and higher increased reality rendering, through either the front or rear of the camera.

Top-end phones, however, ar bit by slowly replacing the depth sensors by incorporating the method into alternative forms of cameras that may additionally sense depth, like those with immoderate camera lens or photograph lenses.

Even so, depth sensors can still be found out on cheaper phones and people that look for to make depth effects without costing a ton, like Lenovo’s Moto G7 devices.

Is single lens better?

Pixel 3
The Google pixel three has one in every of the most effective cameras on the market, with one lens.

So are of these extra lenses worth the price of it?

In distinction to the recently launched quad-lens Samsung Galaxy A9, Google’s latest pixel three and pixel three XL phones contend with simply one lens for the rear camera. wherever the Galaxy A9 sports ultra wide-angle optical lens, standard telephoto camera lens, a regular camera, and a depth sensing element, the pixel devices use software package to supply stabilization, zoom, and depth effects. The results are not quite pretty much as good as they might be with multiple lenses and sensors, however the gap is tiny and negligible if you’re not a photo fanatic and just using it to obtain slightly good quality photos than the average camera, Google’s phones form up for the slight deficit with glorious low-light performance.

While multiple lenses do not guarantee higher quality photos, they every have a selected purpose, currently assuming that you read this article thoroughly and you now have a good idea about the lenses and it’s purposes what they’ll do, inspect phone reviews and sample pictures, after that you’ll realize, to ascertain if what pictures speak to you the foremost.

Thank-you for reading this article. If you made this far, then you’re the most wonderful person to me.

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VNAY RVKR

20 YO, Guy with sustained love for Technology, Entrepreneurship and Self development.