genuinely dont understand the logic behind having that many cameras. Surely it would just be better to have a singular better sensor, and some additional hardware for it?
I believe the extra cameras are fixed optical zoom. The physical limitations of the phones dimensions means you can’t have 1x-10x zoom, because the lens would need to move forward and backward like on a real camera lens. So you’ve got a 1x, 3x, 10x, fish-eye, etc.
Edit: I should add that Motorola came out with a hardware attached camera by Zeiss. It was okay, but now I had to keep up with a bag that held all my attachments.
My suspicion is that the main purpose behind the multiple rear cameras is mostly to more easily create depth mapping and improved accuracy location metadata.
now I had to keep up with a bag that held all my attachments.
That seems to be what they want. Or, where do you keep your USBc<->3.5mm conversion dongle if not in the bag with your headphones, lens clip, etc – in your kitchen drawer.
i mean, size constraints, sure. But camera bumps ONLY get bigger, and more unreasonable. Remember the iphone 6? little itty bitty nub. That’s not the case anymore.
apple? (Idk, i dont care tbh) recently unveiled the incredible technology known as “two mirrors” in order to abuse the dimensions of an iphone to get a longer focal length.
Even then, surely you could just put a bigger, higher resolution sensor on it, and then use digital zooming instead. That way it at least pretends to have features. Even then why bother adding more features, it’s a phone, all it’s going to do is be a nuisance at family gatherings. Because for some reason people HAVE to take pictures of everything.
If they could save money by doing everything with one camera and lens, don’t you think they would?
People want better pictures. The only solution engineers could figure out was to put more camera modules. Why do you care how it’s done? One bump or ten, the phone is already thicker.
phone companies have been known to make stupid decisions before. Apple uses glass on the back of their phones, even though it breaks incredibly easy. Up until more recent models the back glass was incredibly aggressively bonded to the back chassis of the phone, making it basically impossible to replace.
If i had to guess, it’s the cheapest way, to get “more” features and “quality” out of a phone. Like a gimmick. I’m almost certain it’s possible to just put in a better camera sensor, they’ve been doing that on every model for decades. Chances are they just took the easy route, since it adds a unique feature, that has never been seen before, and makes it easily marketable. And besides, for people like me who barely use the camera, paying for upwards of 5 cameras, when i only use 2. More than likely 1, is completely useless to me. I’d be more inclined to pay for a single better camera, than multiple cameras i probably wont use.
Digital cameras were a multi billion dollar business before smartphones existed. Over 100 million digital cameras were sold each and every year.
I’m almost certain it’s possible to just put in a better camera sensor
You are absolutely wrong. Look at the physical size of digital cameras. Lenses have physical limitations. Higher density sensors are diffraction limited. That is you can’t make the sensor pixel element smaller because it is smaller than the wavelength of light. Cameras don’t look like this https://spuelbeck.net/canon-ef-300mm-f28/ just for fun. It’s physically necessary for the lens to be that large.
since it adds a unique feature,
It takes a better picture. Calling a better picture a gimmick is like calling a faster CPU a gimmick. Some people want better photos.
Ranting about cameras you don’t use is like ranting about CPU cores you don’t use. I don’t game on my phone, where’s my phone without a GPU??? Stupid GPU gimmick.
idk i think a design choice is a pretty objective feature. Preference and liking it? Pretty subjective, sure. That still doesn’t change that.
it might take a better picture, it depends on how you define better. More versatile camera? Sure. Better? Eh, idk. And besides, pretty much every phone ever these days has some sort of built it AI processing done on the photos, because apparently thats a thing now. Even then it doesn’t stop you from taking a worse photo, because you literally have different cameras, for different things, you can just straight up use the wrong camera now. As well as other cool feature like visual artifacting due to camera switching, because it turns out when you put two cameras in two different places, they’re in two different places, and can’t exactly behave in an interchangeable manner.
I guess you could “fix” those issues in software, but thats another story entirely.
idk people have different opinions for gimmicks apparently. I just think having more than one camera is stupid, i’d rather have one decent camera, and a better/cheaper phone otherwise. I barely use it’s camera as is.
it’s a little fundamentally different to having a lot of cpu cores, or a gpu. Or a faster cpu because for some reason you also threw that in there. A faster cpu is generally advantageous as pretty much every piece of software has some amount of sequential code base in it. The only place it wouldn’t make sense is somewhere you quite literally cannot use that processing power. Like a router. Those run on such light hardware you would be wasting entire cycles on the cpu before it can even start another process.
More cpu cores is also generally advantageous, especially in the modern era where people play games, and games like more cores now, or if you edit video, like i do, more cores is objectively more helpful, even if you dont use them 90% of the time. Or even if you just want more multitasking capability. A server for instance really likes cores because it can run a lot of different processes simultaneously. Some servers benefit from high single core freq for instance, i know mine does.
gpus are generally beneficial, i certainly wouldn’t buy a gaming phone to use as a phone for what i do, though apparently they have massive batteries so that would likely outweigh that con? Though phone hardware is another beef i have entirely, that’s a different story.
gpus are similarly useful, considering that they’re a general purpose computing tool, much like cpu, though for different calculations. As opposed to a 3x optical zoom lensed camera. Which is kind of neat ig, i barely take pictures with my phone though. I dont really know why i would want 4 other cameras. Just seems like a waste of money for me.
Smaller sensors pick up less and less light, forcing to bump iso. Limiting low light photography or dealing with very grainy low contrast images. Higher megapixel sensors exacerbate the problem because smaller pixels get less area of light
I think it’s a size constraint. Bigger sensors also require larger lenses. In regular DSLR world a micro four thirds sensor, the sensor size is half the size of a traditional full frame sensor. The lenses are also half the size of a fullframe camera’s lenses and require far less glass and weight.
We can fit 3 smaller sensors with three smaller lenses in a smartphone. Trying to make any of those sensors bigger will require more space than a phone can provide.
Because we have to have smaller sensors, digital zoom reduces fidelity of images. Having multiple lenses optimized for various focal points mitigated this issue
I’m no expert just a hobbyist take my word with a grain of salt lol
genuinely dont understand the logic behind having that many cameras. Surely it would just be better to have a singular better sensor, and some additional hardware for it?
I believe the extra cameras are fixed optical zoom. The physical limitations of the phones dimensions means you can’t have 1x-10x zoom, because the lens would need to move forward and backward like on a real camera lens. So you’ve got a 1x, 3x, 10x, fish-eye, etc.
Edit: I should add that Motorola came out with a hardware attached camera by Zeiss. It was okay, but now I had to keep up with a bag that held all my attachments.
My suspicion is that the main purpose behind the multiple rear cameras is mostly to more easily create depth mapping and improved accuracy location metadata.
As someone with a 3+1 camera phone who likes taking photos, it’s a huge improvement over a single lens. I wouldn’t buy a single lens phone again.
That seems to be what they want. Or, where do you keep your USBc<->3.5mm conversion dongle if not in the bag with your headphones, lens clip, etc – in your kitchen drawer.
i mean, size constraints, sure. But camera bumps ONLY get bigger, and more unreasonable. Remember the iphone 6? little itty bitty nub. That’s not the case anymore.
apple? (Idk, i dont care tbh) recently unveiled the incredible technology known as “two mirrors” in order to abuse the dimensions of an iphone to get a longer focal length.
Even then, surely you could just put a bigger, higher resolution sensor on it, and then use digital zooming instead. That way it at least pretends to have features. Even then why bother adding more features, it’s a phone, all it’s going to do is be a nuisance at family gatherings. Because for some reason people HAVE to take pictures of everything.
I think the laws of optics starts to conflict with this
maybe? I still feel like there just has to be a better solution than “hey lets just add more camera”
If they could save money by doing everything with one camera and lens, don’t you think they would?
People want better pictures. The only solution engineers could figure out was to put more camera modules. Why do you care how it’s done? One bump or ten, the phone is already thicker.
phone companies have been known to make stupid decisions before. Apple uses glass on the back of their phones, even though it breaks incredibly easy. Up until more recent models the back glass was incredibly aggressively bonded to the back chassis of the phone, making it basically impossible to replace.
If i had to guess, it’s the cheapest way, to get “more” features and “quality” out of a phone. Like a gimmick. I’m almost certain it’s possible to just put in a better camera sensor, they’ve been doing that on every model for decades. Chances are they just took the easy route, since it adds a unique feature, that has never been seen before, and makes it easily marketable. And besides, for people like me who barely use the camera, paying for upwards of 5 cameras, when i only use 2. More than likely 1, is completely useless to me. I’d be more inclined to pay for a single better camera, than multiple cameras i probably wont use.
Glass back is a subjective feature.
Digital cameras were a multi billion dollar business before smartphones existed. Over 100 million digital cameras were sold each and every year.
You are absolutely wrong. Look at the physical size of digital cameras. Lenses have physical limitations. Higher density sensors are diffraction limited. That is you can’t make the sensor pixel element smaller because it is smaller than the wavelength of light. Cameras don’t look like this https://spuelbeck.net/canon-ef-300mm-f28/ just for fun. It’s physically necessary for the lens to be that large.
It takes a better picture. Calling a better picture a gimmick is like calling a faster CPU a gimmick. Some people want better photos.
Ranting about cameras you don’t use is like ranting about CPU cores you don’t use. I don’t game on my phone, where’s my phone without a GPU??? Stupid GPU gimmick.
idk i think a design choice is a pretty objective feature. Preference and liking it? Pretty subjective, sure. That still doesn’t change that.
it might take a better picture, it depends on how you define better. More versatile camera? Sure. Better? Eh, idk. And besides, pretty much every phone ever these days has some sort of built it AI processing done on the photos, because apparently thats a thing now. Even then it doesn’t stop you from taking a worse photo, because you literally have different cameras, for different things, you can just straight up use the wrong camera now. As well as other cool feature like visual artifacting due to camera switching, because it turns out when you put two cameras in two different places, they’re in two different places, and can’t exactly behave in an interchangeable manner.
I guess you could “fix” those issues in software, but thats another story entirely.
idk people have different opinions for gimmicks apparently. I just think having more than one camera is stupid, i’d rather have one decent camera, and a better/cheaper phone otherwise. I barely use it’s camera as is.
it’s a little fundamentally different to having a lot of cpu cores, or a gpu. Or a faster cpu because for some reason you also threw that in there. A faster cpu is generally advantageous as pretty much every piece of software has some amount of sequential code base in it. The only place it wouldn’t make sense is somewhere you quite literally cannot use that processing power. Like a router. Those run on such light hardware you would be wasting entire cycles on the cpu before it can even start another process.
More cpu cores is also generally advantageous, especially in the modern era where people play games, and games like more cores now, or if you edit video, like i do, more cores is objectively more helpful, even if you dont use them 90% of the time. Or even if you just want more multitasking capability. A server for instance really likes cores because it can run a lot of different processes simultaneously. Some servers benefit from high single core freq for instance, i know mine does.
gpus are generally beneficial, i certainly wouldn’t buy a gaming phone to use as a phone for what i do, though apparently they have massive batteries so that would likely outweigh that con? Though phone hardware is another beef i have entirely, that’s a different story.
gpus are similarly useful, considering that they’re a general purpose computing tool, much like cpu, though for different calculations. As opposed to a 3x optical zoom lensed camera. Which is kind of neat ig, i barely take pictures with my phone though. I dont really know why i would want 4 other cameras. Just seems like a waste of money for me.
Smaller sensors pick up less and less light, forcing to bump iso. Limiting low light photography or dealing with very grainy low contrast images. Higher megapixel sensors exacerbate the problem because smaller pixels get less area of light
which would be why i would argue to just min max on the one camera. Overall a better camera, maybe not as versatile, but meh.
I think it’s a size constraint. Bigger sensors also require larger lenses. In regular DSLR world a micro four thirds sensor, the sensor size is half the size of a traditional full frame sensor. The lenses are also half the size of a fullframe camera’s lenses and require far less glass and weight.
We can fit 3 smaller sensors with three smaller lenses in a smartphone. Trying to make any of those sensors bigger will require more space than a phone can provide.
Because we have to have smaller sensors, digital zoom reduces fidelity of images. Having multiple lenses optimized for various focal points mitigated this issue
I’m no expert just a hobbyist take my word with a grain of salt lol
Hold my beer…
Good beer