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Smartphones offer multiple cameras to increase your creative options and improve overall image quality through software. You’re probably using all the cameras on your phone, even if you don’t realize it.
Modern smartphones contain multiple cameras, giving you several creative options when photographing family members, road trips, soccer games, and more. But most likely, you don’t really understand how these cameras work, and you may feel like you only use the “main” camera.
Here’s the good news; You are already using all the cameras on your smartphone, even if you don’t know it. And with just a little knowledge, you’ll improve your photography skills and get even more use out of your phone’s wide variety of cameras.
Why do smartphones have multiple cameras?
Digital cameras contain a ton of small parts. But the most important components of a digital camera are the image sensor and the lens. While the image sensor dictates the resolution and overall quality of the photo, the lens controls stylistic quirks like field of view or focal length; we’re oversimplifying things here, but that’s the gist. (And yes, we’ll explain what these terms mean in a bit.)
Mirrorless and professional DSLR cameras have a built-in image sensor, which cannot be removed. Therefore, to give the photographer more stylistic freedom, DSLR and mirrorless cameras offer an interchangeable lens system. If you need a detailed photo of a far away subject, just take out your telephoto lens and snap it on the camera!
Smartphones are too small and fragile to use interchangeable lenses. So to mimic the flexibility of a “real” camera, phones offer multiple image sensors, each with its own unique lens.
Phones automatically switch between these cameras as you take photos, eliminating the learning curve associated with DSLR or mirrorless cameras (automatic camera switching usually occurs when zooming in or out). That said, you can manually select a lens from your phone’s camera app, similar to how a professional photographer might pull a lens out of their bag.
Wide or “main” cameras: general purpose photography
A wide-angle camera has a relatively short focal length, usually between 24mm and 35mm (we’re talking equivalent focal length, by the way). This provides a wide field of view, allowing you to capture larger scenes than you could with a telephoto lens. Plus, the short focal length gives you a great depth of field – close-up objects Y the background remains in focus.
Smartphone camera apps always default to the wide angle lens. This is therefore generally referred to as the “primary” lens on a smartphone, and unsurprisingly, it’s the ideal choice for most photos.
That being said, wide-angle cameras tend to produce some very “basic” photos. To solve this problem, manufacturers can use “computational photography” to improve the quality or style of the image. Basically the phone runs your images through some software to make them prettier.
iPhone Portrait mode is a great example of “computational photography.” As we mentioned earlier, wide-angle lenses keep your subject and background in focus. But Portrait mode uses data from a phone’s telephoto camera (which has a shallow depth of field) to blur the background behind a subject.
It’s also worth noting that due to technological limitations, the vast majority of smartphone cameras use a fixed focus lens. This type of lens cannot be adjusted to magnify an image. Therefore, optical zoom is off the table, and digital zoom (which noticeably reduces photo quality) usually takes its place.
But some smartphones offer optical zoom with a neat trick: they switch to a different camera, usually one with a 3x telephoto lens. This is one of the biggest motivators behind a multi-lens design. Even if a user doesn’t understand their phone’s cameras, they’ll notice that the zoom feature looks better on a new phone.
Telephoto Cameras: High-Quality Zoom
Telephoto lenses are basically the opposite of wide angle lenses. They have a long focal length between 50mm and 80mm, which means they are “zoomed in” by default and capture a relatively narrow area of a scene.
As the name suggests, a telephoto lens is made for capturing far away subjects. If you need to take a picture of a bird in a tree or a kid on a softball field, switch to the telephoto lens. This happens automatically when you zoom in on a telephoto camera and is usually indicated by a small on-screen icon showing a “2x” or “3x” zoom ratio.
Telephoto lenses have a shallow depth of field. So while your subject remains in focus, objects in the background (or objects that are very close to the camera) can have a nice natural blur. Surprisingly, this makes the telephoto lens a great choice for portraits: the narrow FOV helps you frame your subject, while the shallow depth of field gives you slight (or extreme) background blur.
But this effect is less noticeable on a smartphone’s telephoto camera, where limitations related to sensor size, aperture, and focal length can “clog” a shallow depth of field. Unless your background is far awayYou usually need computational photography to achieve background blur when using a smartphone telephoto camera.
We should also keep in mind that telephoto lenses can “compress” an image. This is a side effect of the shallow depth of field: the background appears to be “closer” to the subject. It can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your sense of style.
Ultra-wide cameras: capture more than one scene
As you can probably guess, ultra-wide cameras capture an extremely large area of any scene. They may even feel “out” compared to your typical wide-angle camera, which is why smartphones typically designate the ultra-wide lens as “0.5x zoom.”
Ultra-wide cameras have a focal length between 16mm and 24mm. This provides an extremely large depth of field. Essentially, everything in your image stays in focus.
With its short focal length and deep depth of field, the Ultra Wide Camera is a great choice when shooting in almost any environment. Your phone’s ultra-wide lens is ideal for landscape photography, but it can also capture a wealth of detail in tight spaces, such as hallways, city streets, or car interiors.
That being said, ultra-wide lenses do introduce barrel distortion when shooting at close range. It’s like a light version of the “fisheye” effect: the center of the image moves forward, while the edges move to the left and right corners at a curved angle.
You will find that this distortion is desirable in some situations. It can make images look surreal, and if you put an ultra-wide camera up to your pet’s face, the results are a lot of fun. But generally speaking, this distortion discourages people from using their ultra-wide camera when shooting subjects at close range.
Other Cameras: Macro and Monochromatic
Manufacturers often go a bit crazy with cameras in mid-range phones. They throw everything at the wall, usually in an attempt to make their budget devices feel a bit more “premium.” For this reason, your phone may have a macro camera or a monochrome sensor.
A macro camera is specially designed to focus on small subjects, usually at an extremely close distance. You can use a macro camera to take detailed pictures of LEGOs, for example, although they’re usually used on flowers, insects, eyeballs, and other things that look dramatic when viewed in great detail.
But unless you’re a fan of macro photography, a macro lens isn’t very useful on a smartphone. That’s why the latest iPhone uses a telephoto lens for its “macro shooting mode.” The results are quite impressive and we expect other smartphones to follow Apple’s lead in this area.
As for monochrome sensors, well, let’s first explain a typical camera sensor. When capturing full-color images, a digital camera’s sensor needs to individually capture red, blue, and green wavelengths, which are combined by an image sensor processor (ISP). Monochrome cameras capture all of this light at once, providing a dramatic increase in contrast and eliminating the need for an ISP.
Of course, monochrome sensors only take black and white photos. You can use a monochrome sensor like a basic black and white camera, but generally speaking, smartphones include this sensor to increase the contrast of full color images. Photos are taken simultaneously with both the main camera and the monochrome sensor, and contrast information is extracted from the black and white image to enhance your full color photo.
Again, these cameras are usually included in mid-range phones. As a result, there aren’t too many phones with high-quality macro cameras or monochrome sensors.
Time of Flight (ToF) Sensors: Enhanced Depth Sense
Some devices, including modern iPhones, use a Time of Flight (ToF) sensor to measure depth. It fires a burst of IR light, measures the amount of time it takes for the light to return, and spits out a 3D depth map that can be used by computational photography software or “room mapping” apps.
The iPhone’s ToF sensor is accompanied by a LiDAR sensor. Both technologies perform the same basic task, although LiDAR sensors are slightly more accurate, as they send multiple bursts of light not visible. As you can imagine, the ToF sensor requires much less processing power, making it the ideal choice for photography.
That being said, a smartphone can take great photos without a ToF sensor. The iPhone primarily uses its ToF sensor to improve focusing in low light and provide greater precision in Portrait mode. Rival smartphone brands have mostly shunned this technology, and Samsung ditched ToF sensors after the Galaxy S9.
We should also note that the iPhone uses ToF and LiDAR for Face ID (and Samsung used to use this technology for its Iris Scan feature). That’s why facial recognition is more secure on iPhone than Android: devices like the Pixel 7 scan 2D photos for Face Unlock, but the iPhone handles 3D depth maps.
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