Why those Camera Bumps though?
Do they have a purpose?
Let’s go back to about six years ago. It is 2014. A long time before we get into a devastating global pandemic. This year sparked a trend in the smartphone industry which would eventually lead humanity to this:
The Samsung Galaxy Note 20’s — camera bump. This story isn’t about how good or bad the Note 20 is. The camera bump is not unique to this phone but a large number of them from various brands. And, this story is about camera bumps in general.
Full disclosure, I dislike them for two reasons:
- I like to keep my phone screen facing up and can’t do that with a camera bump
- The camera bump gives me a perpetual fear of damaging it whenever I am placing it somewhere
The culprit behind this was the iPhone 6 which was released in 2014; which is why I asked you to go back to that year. iPhone 6 was the first major big-brand smartphone to introduce the camera bump. Then, with every generation, iPhone camera bumps only got bigger. And, almost every other brand followed suit with their own camera bumps.
With the iPhone X, even Apple introduced a Dual Camera system much like its peers then. Some even had a tri-camera system. But, just to be clear, iPhone 6 was the most famous phone to have made this decision. Camera bumps have been making the rounds from a few years prior to the iPhone 6’s release. Such as these Nokia Phones:
But the burning question, ‘why do these bumps exist’ still remains, and with a little research, I have realised the Camera Bumps exist due to three main reasons — Physics, Differentiation, and User Experience. Let’s break them down one by one. I will be using the iPhone 6 as an example, but the points below apply to most phones.
Reason #1 Physics
At the time of iPhone 6’s release, due to circumstantial evidence, one could say that the speed at which the camera tech was evolving was lesser than the tech in other parts of the phone. The evidence being that many phones started getting thinner save for the camera area.
But, even with all the advanced optics and sophisticated systems in place, physics posed a challenge. There needs to be a certain distance between the image sensor and the lens for an aperture if you wish to retain image quality. The science behind this is as simple as those ray tracing line diagrams we learnt at school. And as you know, Apple is always all about the quality.
Apple, at the time, was also focusing on making slimmer phones to give it an edge in the growing premium phone market. Thus, making the phone fatter was to match the camera bump height wasn’t an option.
In summary, Apple was fighting two games — the camera quality and phone thickness. Unfortunately, it couldn’t win both.
But, as evidenced by their marketing collateral we can see that they weren’t happy with their decision as well.
Look at these images and note the angles. Every image is carefully shot at an angle so as to not show off the ugly bump prominently. Wonder how Jony Ive slept that year!
Over time with the growing requirement for powerful cameras on phones, they only got bigger (and uglier!).
There were positives to this decision as well. Giving into the bump also ensured that they could pack more tech inside. iPhones started having Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) on their phones and that was pretty useful for videographers. Also, Apple moved from a f2.4 aperture of the iPhone 5s to f2.2 on the iPhone 6 which led to significantly better photos. Have a look some comparison photos between those phones below:
Reason #2 Differentiation
By 2014/15, Snapchat and Instagram have been very active for about 4 years then and photos were becoming all the rage. Text based social media were slowly phasing out into social-photo-sharing services of sorts.
Not everybody could afford high-end cameras and no high-end cameras could have Snapchat and Insta on them. Solution: better cameras on phones.
From this time on, and even now, the system tech gap between the costliest smartphones and the cheaper ones are slowly closing. Not everybody really required 8GB RAM on their phone. Not everybody needs 4 cores to process their data. Most of the general consumers used their phone for communication apps, phone calls and social media. Gaming, while still popular, wasn’t the highest priority to most people. So, companies began to see that wooing people with tech, like how they would for a laptop/PC, wasn’t going to work for them anymore.
Thus, companies started backing cameras with the differentiation in the camera. So, we started hearing about 12MP cameras, 16MP cameras, at times a ridiculous 42MP camera on a phone from time to time. The credit for the last one goes to Nokia Lumia 1020.
And, then people began flocking to phones with higher megapixel cameras. This was the rage for many years. But, in case you already don’t know, Megapixels mean more size and not essentially quality. I would like to quote this point from an article on the Huffington Post:
“The truth is that a megapixel is more a measure of size, not of quality. The only thing more megapixels can truly guarantee you is the ability to get a much larger picture. So yes, if you are looking to print billboard-size images, then perhaps a higher megapixel count will make a difference. But just how good a picture will be in terms of quality (colour, depth, detail, contrast, dynamic range and so much more) depends on the quality of the camera’s other parts — the sensor that is fitted inside the camera, the lenses, the size of the aperture, the software processing and so on.”
Fun fact, the iPhone 11 Pro Max still carries a 12MP camera, and takes arguably the best photos on a phone. And, the Google Pixel 4 is about 12.2 MP.
Over time, the same social media that sparked this need also began to educate people that Megapixels aren’t everything. And thus, the differentiation has now moved to the number of cameras which could do different functions (like super-zooming, and ultra-wide cameras) leading to wider bumps. This game is still panning out. We just have to wait and watch.
Reason #3 User Experience
Almost everyone, who doesn’t know much about photography, judge cameras and lenses purely on size. For those who don’t know anything about photography automatically assume that a bigger lens is more powerful. It is, but for a specific purpose. A long looking lens (400mm) is useless to shoot a portrait of a person. A powerful GoPro Hero 8 with an ultrawide lens is also useless to shoot a portrait of a person.
An ideal portrait lens can be somewhere between 50mm to 105mm; and these are pruny looking compared to the mammoth 400mm (and higher) lenses. So, here the tech is directly related to the purpose. And, only then do we start talking of power.
While this camera system above is like a beast, it is a nightmare to shoot with, if you want to take a simple picture of a pizza on your dining table.
In short, people judge a book by its appearance. Just look at the lineup below for the best smartphone cameras of 2019 test by the DXO mark website. They had winners for different categories and functions beyond the overall. If one were to go purely based on looks, the one on the left-most, Huawei, is the winner since it looks the beefiest.
The companies began to take notice of this, and like the Megapixels Wars of the yore, the new wars started revolving around this user experience. A general consumer would just look at the camera and make his decision. Case in point: Even when the iPhone Xs was doing dual camera systems, Google Pixel 3 stuck to a single camera. Pixel 3 was no lesser to the iPhone Xs in image quality and, in fact, was better.
Today, there’s two kinds of players in the market. The makers who justify their bump with the tech and those who don’t. I would put Apple, Samsung and a handful of others in that area. While they have beefed up their camera bumps, it is mostly justified.
Then, there are players who try to pander to a person who judges phones only by the looks, and they start working with gimmicks. Let me show you a few examples below.
Note the text next on the camera bump. AI Triple Camera. There’s little to no justification of those words. Minusing the AI part, it’s just describing what’s written there.
A warrior from the past, still talking of 64 Megapixels. Also has not two (like the Pixel 4), not three (like the iPhone 11 Pro), but four AI cameras.
This just writes the word Leica. Right off the bat, one can’t even figure out how Leica has contributed to the camera system. But, it adds to the user experience for customers with its big brand name.
I don’t want to sound like I am bashing these brands but hope you see different marketing gimmicks companies are upto.
After analysing all this, one thing is clear, bumps are here to stay and they’re about to get bigger. But, the question remains, will they always be better?
