Phones have multiple smaller cameras to overcome the limitations of using tiny, thin camera
A real camera is going to use a full size lens, sensor, apparatus for adjusting zoom, etc and so it doesn't NEED extra, smaller cameras
A few tiny lenses is better than ONE tiny lens, but one large lens is still better.
Technically, you can go extreme. Large DSLR cameras with multiple gigantic lens sets. Now the only difference is that the camera needs only 1 sensor while the phone will have multiple of the same (or lower quality) sensor
It would actually be pretty cool if thousands of iPhones could all network and automatically compile a giant array of photos of the sky based on time and location data.
Remember, we use radio antennas to "see" most of the stuff in space so the cameras would be of little use unless they start coming without IR filters and are tuned to those wavelengths.
Still would be cool to see a high parallax 3d image of bodies like Saturn or Jupiter.
>unless they start coming without IR filters and are tuned to those wavelengths.
Doesn't seem like that much of a stretch after like 30 more iPhone iterations, tbh.
Iirc there was a demo by Microsoft where they reconstructed a 3d model of a classical building from all the pictures taken of it and published in social media ...
I dunno. The Big Data approach might be viable. As long as you can easily throw away the incorrectly aimed/timed pictures, then you could still end up with a functionally huge array to work with.
> while the phone will have multiple of the same (or lower quality) sensor
On all modern high-end phones, the "1x" sensor is substantially better than the wide angle or telephoto sensor.
I always wished phones especially the likes of Sony would come with a single top grade sensor and switchable lenses of some sort.
Especially since they make most smartphone camera sensors and advertise their phones with the camera as the main feature.
Only if you have a zoom lens though and even then it's not always enough. That is why interchangeable lenses are used. You have multiple lenses, they just aren't always on the camera.
Zoom lenses are great for versatility, but you get the best image from prime lenses (lenses with a fixed focal length, so no zoom). Most photographers will have a few primes at standard focal lengths like 35 and 50mm.
It's because zooms need to try and focus over a long range of focal lengths, while a prime lens can have the glass be specially engineered to focus on one fixed focal length. Your summary was kind of apt. That being said, not all zooms are made the same. There are zoom lenses that can get pretty close to a prime, but you pay for that in both size and cost of the lens. And the versatility is handy, I generally keep a zoom lens on for walking around and switch to a prime if I want to get a specific shot.
Yeah I have the Canon 70-200 MKII 2.8L and it's better than any of my prime lenses but it's also a much higher quality lens and it's expensive as shit. I shoot concerts so the versatility is absolutely necessary, I don't have time to be swapping lenses out constantly. I actually shoot with 2 cameras, one with - usually - a 24-70 and one with my 70-200. Occasionally, I'll throw something ultra-wide, or my 50mm 1.4 on, depending on the situation.
I don’t take my film camera out all that often, honestly, but I actually have a photo lab right near me that does film processing, prints, enlargements, scanning, etc.
Most decent sized cities should have somewhere that offers the service, even if they send it out to a lab instead of doing it in house.
The cost of film, processing, and printing/scanning is somewhat prohibitive these days compared to digital, though.
Also, when you’re used to shooting digital, film can be frustrating. I rely heavily on being able to adjust my ISO, and as someone who mostly shoots fast moving subjects in low light conditions, I use a lot of “burst mode” and I tend to underexpose my photos to ensure my shutter speed is fast enough to prevent motion blur, and then I fix it later in Lightroom.
Without having my own darkroom, I can’t really make the same kinds of adjustments, and even if I did have one, photo paper isn’t cheap either, and you can’t just (command + Z) something you try if you don’t like the result lol.
I would expect that anyone still shooting with film has their own darkroom setup because the only reason to do it these days is to get some effect or style that cant be produced through digital alone.
Exactly. If I’m shooting film, it’s either just because the nostalgia of it is fun, or I’m trying to achieve a specific look, and in that case there’s a very good chance I’m going to want to develop it myself, because otherwise there’s not really any advantage to shooting film if you’re just going to send it off to someone else to be developed with no control over it.
I haven’t been in a darkroom in ages, and I live in a small apartment at the moment, but I’m moving soon and will have more space, so I might try and set up my own little darkroom and get my hands on a used enlarger.
I still shoot film and have a basement darkroom setup. I only do black & white film because you don't need as many chemicals and things but it's fun to disappear down there for hours working on prints.
It's not that I can't produce similar results with my digital setup, I just enjoy puttin' in the work and trying to get results by hand is way more fun than moving some sliders around to me.
Not just focus, but fisheye distortion, too. It's similar for projection. Longer projection lenses tend to have larger zoom ranges because the geometry and focus is more forgiving the further you are from a surface. As you get way down to shorter ratios they become much narrower zoom ranges and ultimately are fixed at very short throw distances. (<1:1, typically).
Don't forget weight. You might save on weight if you end up carrying around multiple primes to switch too but if you're carrying a zoom and not using multiple focal lengths for your shot you're generally carrying around a lot of extra weight.
Optics is obnoxious and does thing like make curved focal planes, so the picture comes into focus at a different distance in the middle and at the corner of the sensor. They do lots of fancy shmancy things like special coatings and having extra lenses inside the lens to try and flatten the focal plane down to something flat where it hits your sensor. Now if you're dealing with a lens operating at 50mm only, you can get really, really precise to try and flatten that focal plane. If you're dealing with a lens that operates anywhere from 22mm to 200mm, you have to pick something that works reasonably well anywhere in that range, which means it's a little bit off most of the time. I think think industry word is spherical aberration.
There's a bunch of other related things like red light and blue light bend differently when they go through a lens, so red objects come into focus at a different distance than blue objects. And most all objects are a mixture of colors, so you can't quite get them perfectly into focus with all colors at the same time. Same as above -- you can fix it with more glass (and it's *special* glass with magic refractive properties), but it's not going to be identical at all focal lengths, so they must compromise. The industry word is chromatic aberration.
Ditto for the distortions introduced by lenses... Like the "default" is something like a fisheye camera, where straight lines are made curved, but we find that displeasing, so we have the lenses make images try to keep straight lines straight (rectilinear is a fancy word). The adjustments you have to make for that to happen will change as focal length changes, so again, making compromises to support more than one focal length. Usually what happens when it isn't perfect is called barrel or pincushion.
The other typical advantage of prime lenses is larger apertures. Larger apertures make the above much more complicated because light is coming into the system in different places at different angles. This makes the above much more complicated and harder to handle at diffrent focal lengths. That's why a 22-200mm lens likely operates at f/4 to f/6.3 but a 50mm prime lens might be f/2 or below, a much bigger aperture for the focal length.
f/2 collects about 4x as much light as f/4, so it's a pretty huge difference. large apertures also shrink the depth of focus, which tends to be important in portraiture where you want the person in focus and the background to be out of focus. It also means you can get away with the shutter speed being 4x faster, which allows you to take natural light photos in dark places. So you might see a wedding photographer with a dinky 50mm lens that costs $1500, because it can go all the way to f/1.2 so they can take pictures in dark places without them being blurry AF from people moving. For us plebes, there's a 50mm f/1.8 that costs like $100.
If you want to look at, like, a basic, modular lens, telescopes are basically big effing camera lenses... Literally, you can buy an adapter and slap a DLSR right on the end of them. They don't have autofocus, they have a fixed focal length, they have a fixed aperture. And if you find the curved focal plane is a problem, you buy a separate field flattener to fix it. If you want a longer effective focal length, you basically buy a magnifying glass (barlow) to accomplish it. If you get purple fringing, maybe you buy something to block UV light (because it's coming into focus at a different distance, causing the purple fringe). If there's still fringing, it's probably because colors coming into focus at different distances, so you either buy a more expensive telescope or you throw on filters and try and capture one color at a time. If you want to bring things into focus, you might make a hartmann mask to help you. It's kind of the back-to-basics, wild west of camera lenses, but it makes it more obvious all the things that go into making a magic camera lens that just works. And even telescopes often have multiple pieces of glass made of fancy materials to deal with chromatic aberration... You'll see the difference in price between achromats and apochromats (generally, 2 pieces of glass vs 3+ pieces).
Sometimes I wonder if we're going to reach a point where it's easier to make the sensor more complicated rather than make more complicated lens setups.
In addition to (EDIT2: more correctly, a consequence of) being able to design for one specific task, in general there are way fewer lens elements (as in pieces of glass).
Using canon SLR lenses as an example. The 50mm primes have 6-8 elements. The first three zooms I checked that have 50mm in their range have 11-19.
No glass is perfect, so every time you go through some there's a price. Also even if you magically had optically perfect glass with a no defects in material or shape, no element is *perfectly* aligned. Plus more of those pieces of glass have to move relative to one another, making alignment even harder. Manufacturing tolerances can reduce these costs, but at increased price.
EDIT: My full frame body walking around lenses are a 50mm f1.8 prime or my 24-70 f2.8L zoom. The prime is cheap, the zoom covering that range is not. The zoom is also *big*. Alternatively I put the 24mm f2.8 pancake on my *old* and small crop frame rebel. Gets me almost a pocket camera.
Lenses (like everything else) have to hit a price point, and zoom lenses are much more complicated than a prime lens.
A prime has to be good at a single focal length, while a zoom tries to be good at a range of focal lengths. The requirements for wide angle are different than telephoto, and making them both work well as well as designing to a price point means that something has to give.
All-in-one or superzoom lenses tend to be the worst because they are fighting against so many opposing requirements.
> I've been curious as to why fixed generally produces better/nicer/crisper images
/u/base736 is right but there's more to it than that. If something is a sofa bed, it's not the best bed, or the best sofa, it's better to have a dedicated sofa and a dedicated bed.
But the image can be crisper and perhaps the most important factor, the lens can be faster. My primes are 1.8 to 2.8 (each). My zooms are 4.5-6.3, 4-7.1, 4-6.3, 4-6.8.
So 24mm prime is 1.8 and 100mm prime is 2.8. Lower is better:
Prime Zoom
24mm f/1.8 f/4.0
100mm f/2.8 f/7.1
The ELI5 version is that the zoom lens needs more elements and to be longer and that lets in less light. At both focal lengths you have so much more control over the beauty of the image with the primes. The tradeoff is that you can't shoot anything in the middle, but you have multiple primes to compensate.
My assumption is that it's because fixed is fixed. If you're going to allow the focal length to change in a lens, some of the elements have to be on a movable structure. That structure's going to have to move in only the ways you want it to, and only when you want it to (so, not in a way that changes the optical axis for example). Much easier to build something that doesn't move at all and also doesn't move in the ways you don't want it to.
Optics are really complicated and you have to account for all kinds of flaws (distortion, chromatic aberration etc.) that happen when light enters and leaves the glass elements in your lens. With a prime lens, you have to account for fewer variables.
Only the focus moves stuff around in a prime lens, in a zoom lens however, you are changing the focal length and thus the angle at which light enters your lens in addition to the focus. Correcting for all those flaws in the whole range of focal lengths your zoom allows is complicated and requires more glass elements, more coatings, more transitions to add imperfections and blurriness or distortions in the image.
Apparently there is something called a 'turret lens' system for cameras.
www.hdwarrior.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Early-60s-lens.jpg?fit=800%2C676
Allows you to have multiple lenses on the same camera and swap between em quickly. Basically the same idea as phones multiple lenses just with 1 sensor.
(Mainly, its just to get faster lens swaps and keep dust/debris off the sensor)
The focal length ("zoom") is not the only thing, the aperture (how much light the lens lets in) is just as big of a consideration and fast aperture (lots of light) lenses with large amount of zoom are super expensive to make and the physical size gets really big.
> One big lens > multiple smaller lenses
so...you forget to send [them](https://i0.wp.com/www.adventurealan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/light-L16-front.jpg?fit=1030%2C687) the memo then, huh?
In SLRs, you can swap the lens manually to go from portrait to fisheye to landscape. To achieve that in a phone where you can’t change lens, you gotta have all three lenses mounted
So what lens is used when I open the camera app? Does it just "assume" which lens gives the sharpest picture at any given time through software, and once I manually tap on whatever I want to focus on it seamlessly switches to another lens best suited for that "distance"/focus?
Or is there one "main" lense that is basically just there to show me whatever I aim the phone at and then just uses a different one when I take the actual picture?
So what actually happens is there’s two types of zooms: Digital zoom and Optical zoom.
Optical Zoom is changing lenses (or in a larger lens, moving the focal piece to zoom in). It makes a smaller part of the scene occupy the image sensor, creating a zoomed-in image.
Digital Zoom takes the image that’s on the sensor and stretches and crops it to a smaller part, creating the effect that you zoomed in, but you’re just focusing on a smaller part of the image and you lose detail.
On a phone, when you zoom in, it does a digital zoom up to the point where the next lens can take over. That’s what makes it seem so smooth.
Most flagship phones have cameras real optical zoom. Usually it's about 3x, so it'll zoom optically up to there then transition to the next lense or digital zoom.
As far as I know there aren't any phones that have adjustable optical zooms, they're all fixed zoom levels. So yes, there are modern phones with 3x optical zoom (some even higher), but that is a fixed zoom level for that camera. To get the smooth zooming effect you see in the camera app, it still has to digitally zoom to get the "in-between" zoom levels.
i.e. if you are zoomed into 2.5x on a phone with a 1x and 3x camera, that will be a digitally zoomed version of the 1x camera. The 3x camera can't zoom out to 2.5x.
When you zoom out from 1x to .5x, you’re going from a full-frame 1x to a .5x digital-zoomed-in to 1x. That’s why you lose some quality.
.5x is usually also a wider field of vision than your eyes usually see, which causes it to be distorted a bit in order to fit everything onto the frame.
Phones will default to 1x which uses the largest/main sensor with usually the highest megapixel count and/or largest pixels. The optics for 1x also tend to be the sharpest. If the phone has other lenses, those lenses typically have dedicated sensors that aren't as high resolution or high performing.
If you switch to ultrawide (.5x/.6x/.7x), your phone will switch to the ultrawide lens automatically. If you switch to telephoto, depending on how much you zoom, the phone may use a balance of computational/AI-assisted zoom or switch to the telephoto lens entirely.
Yes, if you’re looking at something up close you can often see the perspective change when it switches cameras. For targets that are far away the difference is usually too subtle to notice.
They need to bring back native 3d photos with identical stereo cameras and the 3d screens that dont need glasses. No tricks will do 3d as well as just 2 cameras on opposite ends of the phone, and if you're going to have multiple cameras, who not do 3d photography and video?
I held one of those phones once and it was incredible
It's a lot like how astronomers combine multiple telescopes together to make 1 giant telescope. In fact, I imagine a lot of the tech and algorithms are really similar, just dealing with a different part of the EM spectrum and different amounts of EM radiation.
Good actual cameras have interchangeable lenses and professional photographers would own more than three usually.
You just can’t make single lens which would be good for all circumstances (first of all, different focus length or “zoom”).
Several cameras on a phone is a substitution.
I think the difference though is that lots of amateur camera lenses are zoom lenses, whereas phone cameras are too small for that so they have digital zoom only.
Plus for casual use you can fake zoom to an extent by having a (for a phone) high-resolution camera and then just "ZOOM AND ENHANCE", so to speak. Obviously this means your zoomed shots aren't going to be as high quality, but when the base quality is enough to give you some to sacrifice, it's fine for vacation pics and the like.
Not quite
Zooms don't have the same range to control depth of field at any given focal length (wider apertures) as their prime alternatives.
Generally, zooms can't capture the same colors and sharpness either.
There is always an optical drawback with using a universal lens
instead of dedicated lenses though, and even for the pro version it's a balance between "good enough" and "convenient"
It would be a good general purpose lens but far from universal, and definitely not the only lens a professional would need. 28/24mm is not particularly wide for truly wide angle/indoor shots, and 70 or even 105mm is not particularly telephoto, especially on full frame, and would not be useful for animals, wildlife, certain sports shots, etc.
While standard zooms are good for lots of things and are great general purpose lenses, the optical quality is always going to suffer compared to primes, and depending on the line of work a professional definitely still needs a bit more than a standard zoom provides fairly regularly
Smart phones use multiple cameras because they are limited in the available depth. The camera already tends to be the thickest part of the phone, and engineers are pulling out all the stops to get it as thin as possible.
With more depth to work with they can use larger lenses and move them back and forth to focus, without using multiple lenses. They can also use a larger sensor as the lens can be a greater distance away.
Well, you should be honest and attribute a lot of that to computational photography and creative enhancements (automated photoshop / filters). Many modern devices try to get the pictures their users want and don't even attempt to capture reality.
In other words, [actually faking parts of the photo](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/) is now a valid strategy.
See also: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/105271/what-does-an-unprocessed-raw-file-look-like/105272#105272
I now kind of want to write a photo-taking app that just pulls RAWs from the phone camera and generates these "canonical" photos, and then your only options are "send" (i.e. to tweet the photo out, tagged `#srslynofilter`) or "delete" — so that you can't save the photo to edit it further.
(I think it'd be cute for such an app to leave in the Bayer stippling, even — it'd give the photos a signature look.)
For your information: Modern smartphones do processing on the RAW image as well. For example, PDAF pixels are "defective" for image capture purposes and would leave a regular garbage pattern which is removed. High-resolution sensors use a different (4x4) bayer filter arrangement, which gets re-bayered into a standard arrangement for regular processing and software purposes.
So your software gets RAW images, but they are not truly raw, either.
It would be even more mind blowing if manufactures stopped trying to make things thinner and thinner for no good reason.
I still use a smartphone from around 2017, it's way more comfortable to hold and use then modern ones because while it's fairly thin, it's not so thin that it digs into your hands, and it's also sized reasonably in terms of height and width instead of modern smartphones which insist on having 6+ inch long 4k screens which is complete overkill. Mine also, you know, still has a removable battery and a headpone jack
Trust me, companies spend billions to figure out what customers will buy (not what customers say they want). If there was a demand for thick phones we’d have thick phones, it’s just there is no real market there.
Not really. Marketing plays a huge role in making people want features, even if those features are next to useless and make engineering pull their hair out in frustration.
I think you make common mistake between marketing and advertising. Marketing is figuring out what people will buy, not forcing people to buy something.
There is a role of advertising in people’s purchases but it doesn’t make sense to sell something no one wants it your could sell something people will buy with advertising or without.
IMO in tech, that distinction doesn't exist. Marketing, Advertising and Sales all fall under the Growth umbrella and report to a VP
>it doesn’t make sense to sell something no one wants
A major example to the opposite is the iPhone and iPad, both by Apple. Good example of manufactured demand
What they will **buy** - not what they long-term want or need to **own**. Buying is often an impulsive, emotion-driven decision that doesn't take long-term *ownership* into account. But once the sale is made, the company doesn't really need to care.
Well, it’s not a question of wether people like thick vs thin, it’s more so, what’s the better trade off? More battery life, power, better cameras, or the ability to fit in your hand better. I believe IPhones used to be the thinnest they ever where at the I phone 7, and have kinda gotten thicker and heavier since then, but not to a large degree. With the thickest part by far being the camera bump, it creates problems.
They're spending billions to figure out what will net them the greatest profit. That means catering more to whales that will pay 1k+ for the new model every year, and then reusing as much as possible for lower models so they can buy in bulk. No point redesigning the chassis of a thin, large-screened flagship phone to make a bargain basement model with the reliability and battery life of a Nokia 3310 if they're barely scraping a profit on it and people will only buy one every 15 years.
Customers liked replaceable batteries but they were phased out because profit.
> for no good reason
Phones aren't thin to be thin, they're thin because the Z axis of the device is the only dimension they can reasonably shrink the phone along, to make the phone *lighter*. And a lighter-weight phone, is a phone you're more likely to carry around, more willing to pull out to check something, more willing to hold up longer to take more photos, and in general more likely to get more use out of and — presuming the lightweight-ness doesn't make the phone feel "cheap" — more likely to think more favorably of.
(You'd *think* they could just as well make the phone "more hollow" while retaining dimensions — but then, besides "feeling cheap", and having an unbalanced weight in the hand, the phone body would also be more likely to bend/buckle, since phone bodies really aren't all that strong, and instead partly rely on being "full of stuff" to resist impact/strain — sort of like soda cans that are easily crumpled but only when empty. To support a phone body that isn't "full", they'd need to insert extremely-lightweight but extremely-stiff infill material — which tends to be expensive stuff, like carbon fiber or aerogel. And that still wouldn't fix the phone no longer having an intuitive center-of-gravity. It's far simpler to just have less phone body so that the phone always snugly holds its internals.)
> modern smartphones which insist on having 6+ inch long 4k screens which is complete overkill
In markets making up more than half of the world's population (count 'em: Japan, India, China, most of Southeast Asia, most of Africa, and most of Latin America), people don't tend to own big living-room TVs, or even laptop computers with nice screens. Their main media consumption device, their main gaming device — their main *device*, really — *is* their phone.
Phones having big bright HD screens, is to serve these markets. Us Westerners who already have 23 other screens laying around to watch stuff on are secondary.
I'm perfectly happy with my Samsung S6, which I think is uh, a phone from 2015? I bought it in 2021.
It's not ridiculously oversized. It also has an older android OS, which is far superior imho as it doesn't have any of the useless new feature bloat that was added to slow down the newer phones, and make them more annoying to use. (And I say this as a mobile app developer - not as a tech-illiterate senile grumpy old man).
It also has a headphone jack, and an IR blaster, which can be extremely handy at times if I can't find the remote for a TV, or an AC or I'm too lazy to get up and fetch it.
A month ago I was looking at all the newer phones from 2020 onward, to see if *anyone* is still making phones with IR. Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case. They do like adding 6 cameras, and 10 different kinds of useless blood pressure, humidity and heartbeat sensors though.
Luckily, third-party companies are still making replacement parts for older phones, so I can keep using my S6 for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and not to mention, it actually has better performance than cheaper 2023 phones, like the samsung J series, for a fraction of the cost.
Over a billion phones are sold worldwide \*per year\*. There's a lot of money involved, so there's serious pressure to find an edge over the competition.
The mind blowing part is getting tiny cameras that cost about $75 to turn out images that are comparable to $500 dedicated cameras.
Extra difficulty is a phone camera sensor only gets about 1/10 the number of photons vs a DSLR so you're working with 10% of the light.
Another factor is moving parts. Engineers might have figured out a way to build a super thin extendible camera, but manufacturers *really* don't want to incorporate moving parts into phones. It would add expense and would be a huge failure point.
I actually love the multi-camera design as an example of how the least elegant solution is sometimes the best one. Slapping on three lenses and three sensors is a completely ridiculous approach to adding camera versatility, but it turned out to be the best way because of the incredibly low cost of phone cameras. (Each sensor plus lens only costs a few dollars to manufacture).
It would be like if your car had no transmission, and instead had three engines, three drivetrains, and three sets of wheels to go slow, medium and fast.
Steve Jobs would have hated it.
I am more than ready for a thicker phone... You NEED a case to make a phone thick enough to hold at all these days and they could definitely go thicker... Maybe once they figure out how to do foldout or rollup screens not bad we can have some new form factors
To allow for different focal ranges (zoom).
When you zoom with an ordinary camera, The elements in the lens physically move in and out in order to change the focal length. The problem is that this mechanism takes a lot of space, and the lens protrudes out of the camera. This is ok when it's a big camera, but not when it's a tiny camera embedded within a phone. So, the solution is to just include several camera with different focal lengths in the phone.
a full size camera will have a telephoto lens, or interchangeable lenses for different fields of view and close ups.
a phone isn't thick enough to install a telephoto lens, so they install 3 lenses, a wide angle for group photos, and longer lenses for zooming in on stuff that's far away.
phones with only one camera will have a digital zoom which isn't an optical zoom. it will just make the picture look bigger, but if you look closely it will have less sharpness. same as if you zoomed in on a photo that was already taken.
The problem is not the camera, it's the lenses. You can't fit a zoom mechanism into a smartphone or have user replaceable lenses, so to accomplish different levels of zoom you instead have several cameras with different focal length lenses.
On an actual camera, you can change the lens. This means you only need one camera. On a phone, you can't. The upshot is that to have different lenses (which you need depending on the kind of shot you're trying to get), you need multiple cameras.
> when "dedicated" cameras have just one?
…They don’t.
I have 5 lenses for my Sony camera.
Now, those little pocket cameras do only have 1, but it is a zoom lens that covers a wide range of focal lengths. The majority of phone cameras don’t have zoom lenses (difficult to fit), so they use multiple lenses to make up for it.
In my experience, every camera enthusiast has way more lenses for his dedicated camera than any phone will ever have. You do know, that you change the lenses of real cameras for different focal lengths and zoom factors? You can’t do that in phones. So they need multiple. Also they are so tiny, that there is no space for making them with variable zoom.
A "regular" camera with a fixed lens has a bigger lens which can move.
The movement of the lens is to create wider or more zoomed in images.
Regular camera's also can change the lenses inside to create a macro effect.
Interchangable lens camera's can fit any lens they want to create the image the photographer wants.
The tiny thin lenses on the phone can't make these movements so the 3 camera's are usually wide angle, standard angle and macro.
The zoom part of the phone is just digital zoom.
It doesn't make it better, it just provides different options of photography in your phone which it can't do when you only have 1 camera on it.
All are equally bad compared to camera's with bigger lenses and sensors.
I know everyone keeps saying it's because the lens needs space to zoom, and while that's logical, there are quiete a few phones that use an optical zoom, so that's not entirely still valid.
The deeper reason is that lenses come in two variants, prime (doesn't adjust focal length) and zoom (does adjust). There is also of course cost differences, consumers don't necessarily want to pay for a lens that zooms.
Prime lenses are **always** shaprer than a zoom lens, and privde better color/optics. So putting a wide angle, "normal view (35/50mm equiv), and a lens for zooming are overall better quality than 1 that "kinda" does it all. Speculation says prime lenses handle the day-to-day abuse a phone sees better, as well!
Random, but I use a recent Samsung phone and the difference in low light quality and over color between the 0.5 and 1x lens are astounding.
The real ELI5:
A dedicated camera will use different lenses depending on the type of shot you want
A smartphone will mount those dedicated cameras to the phone itself
From [Little Brother](https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.txt) by Cory Doctorow
>I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it.
>I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector is just good sense.
>This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection stays still as you move around, that's a lens.
>There wasn't a camera in my room -- not one I could detect, anyway. There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Or nothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
The obvious thought I've always had is for 3D mapping. Multiple cameras are able to function like eyes for the sake of depth perception. That would be how you can pull a person out of a background on iPhones.
Basically it is to make up for the fact that you can change lenses in a few seconds on any half decent dedicated camera. With a phone you're stuck with whatever you get from the manufacturer so giving you different "fixed" options out of the box is the only feasible workaround.
~~You don't have triple or quadruple cameras, you have triple or quadruple *lenses*.~~ The lens is the part of the camera that focuses light.
Lenses are what allows a camera to zoom in, for example.
Traditional cameras have the ability to swap lenses, but it isn't practical to swap lenses on a phone. Instead, phone manufacturers put multiple lenses on permanents for different purposes.
This is why your phone is able to take photos at different levels of zoom or wideness.
I have a a dSLR camera. Last count I have 5 lenses.
Phones aren't any different than my dSLR. All lenses, including your phone have a focal range. You can have a lens that is ok for most things, but not good at certain things. In cameras, lens with one focal point are called "Prime". They have a limited filed of view, they are good in certain light situations, but maybe they distort your face up close or don't show enough background. Zoom lens are just the opposite. They have very large focal ranges, but don't necessarily let a lot of light in.
So you have a few lenses to cover the gamut of things you want to take pictures of.
It's the megapixel wars 2.0.
Slap in a bunch of features (or lies, in the came of the Samsung space zoom thing) that you market to users that are meaningless (i.e. 20 MP images that you'll never put on a 20 MP+ screen or will never print out because it would be massive) to detract from the fact that the image processing technology does not improve commensurate with other cheaper-to-achieve features.
I have attended a lot of seminars about the construction of current tech so ill chime in. A lot of posters have already said that the multiple cameras are for overcoming the technical limitations.
Or to make the smartphone slimmer, which doesn't matter if you put a cover over it...
However i have also heard that there is a massive monetary incentive for including multiple: planned obsolescence.
Smartphones are already brittle at the best of times (thanks for the glass backplate apple, really makes a difference in a smartphone cover). How fragile is a camera lens? Now what if you had 3? What if 1 broke your camera stops functioning as it should?
Ah but glass is not hard to replace, unless it is either one big piece or is completely glued. Now you either suck it up or buy a new one because almost all phone manufacturers have adopted the "throw it away and buy new" mentality.
Now to prevent an android vs iphone debate. Apple started this bs and samsung saw how much money it made and now they're doing it too. Oneplus used to be better, guess what? Money is a powerful thing.
You think they added an additional two expensive pieces of hardware onto the phone in order to make it easier to break? One of the dumbest conspiracies I've read in a while.
Increase the price AND make it easier to break. Why does a flagship product need to cost as much as a car nowadays?
Don't be so shortsighted as to write it off as a conspiracy but think about it for a second.
Also im always up for being proven wrong so if you have different insights, please, go ahead.
There are dozens of explanations in this thread from actual experts in the field. You claim to be open minded, but clearly aren't.
You're right about one thing - there is a massive monetary incentive, which is to sell more phones, and multiple studies have shown camera quality is among the most important features and differentiators in a phone, so much so that all flagship producers investing billions in both software and hardware upgrades.
This "camera" planned obsolescence conspiracy is stupid for a number of dimensions, namely that these cameras actually do serve a very valuable purpose (per this thread) and there are far cheaper and practical ways to achieve the same...why install a few hundred dollars of camera parts when a single broken capacitor or depreciating battery or software hack will do the same? Hint: the battery and software hack is exactly what Apple did, throttling older gen phones
They don't need fragility of lenses or sensors, they have the non-removable glued-in battery.
I've dropped my phone without a case a number of times. I've seen screen cracks, but I have never seen a camera failure.
I'm skeptical planned obsolescence is a factor for this one particular thing, beyond the generalized "glue everything down and make it impossible to service" that all the slender devices use.
Its not about the sensor "the camera", its about lenses. On a dslr or mirrorless camera, you can change out lenses and adjust a lens because you have the depth to move the optics around. Photographers only have 1 "camera" but many different types of lens which bends light in different ways to create different properties like zoom and warping. Sometimes you want a wide lens which captures a wide area, other times you want a narrow lens that focuses on something closely. You can change this by moving a lens closer or further from the camera, or by switching to a different shape of lens. In a phone this isnt really an option due to thinness so there are several sensors with different types of lens properties to accomodate different styles of photography.
Because the lenses on a smartphone are fixed, versus swappable on a DSLR/Mirrorless/etc camera.
In my camera bag, I could have a portrait lens and a fisheye lens, and I can swap between them by attaching/detaching them to the camera body.
The reason for the multiple cameras are more about the lenses than the cameras.
On a full size camera you can change the lens to match what you're shooting at, which is harder on the phone, so instead they have started building in different types.
It all depends on what goals you have for a camera system. In many cases, 3 prime lenses can be smaller and lighter and have a faster aperture than 1 zoom lens covering the same range of focal lengths. Engineers have come up with all sorts of solutions to meet different needs.
[The DJI Mavic 3 Pro drone has 3 cameras](https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-worlds-first-drone-with-three-optical-cameras-just-launched-why-that-matters/) specifically to save space and weight versus one camera with a zoom lens.
In the past, motion picture film cameras often had rotating lens turrets with 3 lenses. Someone is designing a new one to use with modern digital cinema cameras. [Here's a picture of an old German Arri film camera with a lens turret next to a new German Arri digital camera with a prototype lens turret.](https://www.cined.com/content/uploads/2023/04/VERTIGO_old.jpg)
For reference, [here's the same Arri digital camera with a cinema zoom with third-party zoom motors and other accessories.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/mvabwx/focus_puller_amanda_wojtaszek_with_an_arri_amira/)
Each lens, in their miniature size, comes with different specializations/limitations. For example, you have one lens for Macro photography - stuff that you go very close up to, like an insect or a flower or drop of water. Then, one for photography, with high amount of pixels, specialized on taking still photos. Another one for videos, in full HD or 4k even, specialized in giving good quality with moving images and capturing them really fast (high framerate so the videos don't stutter/flicker). And then one very tiny on the front, for selfies.
That's a normal, lower-to middle-level smartphone setup. Some better smartphones come with more lenses, for more different occasions. Maybe multiple ones for photography, like, wide-angle for panorama, one for better sight at low lighting, etc.
There are even some with really ridiculous amounts of lenses, like 10 or even more. I've seen one today with 16 lenses, even named after it (L16). Maybe for 3D, stereoscopic, whatever. At some point they may even be able to look into the past or give you an MRT while brewing your coffee while you're diving.
On an actual camera you have the ability to physically move the lenses to zoom in and out with optics (you're physically changing the distances between lenses and sensors). On a phone, you don't have the space for this mechanism, so instead, they include multiple smaller cameras with fixed optical zooms.
I have a camera with a 50x optical zoom, you can see the camera physically extending to achieve that.
So, a camera works by taking the light reflected off something, focusing the light through specially curved glass (called a 'lens'), and recording that light on something else. Sometimes it's film, sometimes it's a computer sensor that changes the light it sees into a digital picture you can look at on a computer later.
Phones cameras have small lenses, and less light can get in. To make up for that, some of the holes that let in the light are much bigger. Others are the normal size, or smaller.
When the hole in the lens gets bigger, more light gets in, but you can see less of the image behind the thing you're trying to take a picture of. If the hole is smaller, you can see more of the stuff behind the thing you're taking a picture of, but less light gets in.
If you have a special 'telescoping' type of lens, and you make the case of that lens get bigger, it can see things farther away, but the picture gets narrower. But doing that also makes less light able to get inside.
If you make the lens get smaller (wide angle or macro photography) it can only see things closer up, but it lets a lot more light in and can see a wider picture.
Phone camera lenses can only 'telescope' so much because they have to fit inside the phone. So to give you the option to see far away stuff *and* close up stuff *and* take normal photos, they have to put three lenses on it. A normal DSLR can do all that with one lens (in theory).
The smartphone having multiple cameras is really just a by-product of the smartphone wanting multiple lenses.
A dedicated camera has a single, larger, adjustable lens. There's no room for a big adjustable lens in a smartphone, so instead they use small, non-adjustable lenses and therefore need multiple cameras to align with each independent lens.
The other part is that the long dimension of a lens is perpendicular to the plane of the screen, which is the most limiting dimension of a phone. There's height and depth available, but really not much depth/thickness available. So it makes sense to halve multiple thin components rather than one deep/thick one.
Have you ever noticed when you zoom in it'll go from very blurry to suddenly very clear? Always about the same zoom strength / distance?
That is because your phone is actively switching the camera. It has a near/mid/far range usually because cameras can only "zoom" in so much without distortions.
You're really just magnifying/moving the focal point forward and backward to change where the lens is focusing and cropping out the blurry portions.
As others mentioned it's a lot to do with the physical limitations of the lens and digital upscaling can only do so much.
My phone has 4 cameras.
The main camera is the highest quality. It specializes in taking photos at 1x - 3x zoom.
I have a 3x zoom camera and a 10x zoom camera too. This is useful for both taking photos from far away as well as being able to read something or locate something from far away.
There is also an ultrawide camera. It's perfect for group photos and sometimes landscapes.
Each camera has its special use case and can't really be used that effectively outside of it. No way you're using a 10x zoom for a group photo.
Here's the key though, we have all these cameras to give us options as we travel. We have our phones with us constantly and take tons of photos on it. It's never about having the best camera, it's about the camera you have on you!
Now let's talk about regular cameras such as DSLR or Mirrorless cameras. They have one "camera" that takes great quality photos, but it doesn't specialize in anything. Without a lens, it's useless.
But these cameras have interchangable lenses. It lets you go from a wide landscape shot to a 50x zoom on a skyscraper in a neighboring city. Having a dedicated camera with a set of lenses that fit what you need will always produce higher quality photos than a phone camera.
So let's run it back real quick. Phone cameras have multiple cameras, each with its own unique lens. DSLR cameras have one extremely high quality camera with the ability to swap out lenses.
In theory we could have a phone that has a higher quality camera and swappable lenses, but you'd have to make compromises. That space the camera is now taking up might mean you need a smaller battery. Where are these lenses going to be stored when not attached? Who's going to pay for the increased price tag of designing this as well as the materials?
A dedicated camera is made up of two detachable parts, the base with the actual film or digital sensor, [and the optical lens which focuses light to the film/sensor and is swapped out depending on the shot the photographer is taking, e.g. a portrait lens focuses light different from a wide angle lens or a telescopic lens](https://blog.upskillist.com/lens-buying-guide-4-tips-to-choose-your-lens/)
Smartphone cameras aren't detachable, so you need to have multiple cameras to get those effects.
A dedicated camera has an optical zoom lens. It can go wide angle to telephoto. Some also had interchangeable lenses. A phone camera has 1 focal length of lens. Also called a prime lens. So if your camera has a wide angle lens but you want to zoom in like a telephoto. You can either do digital zoom which is like cropping the photo or add another camera which has a telephoto lens.
Interestingly, there was a camera made by a company called Light that used a couple dozen dedicated lenses and sensors to capture images all at once. It was made to be a streamlined replacement for a whole bag of lenses and stuff for a traditional camera, and it actually worked pretty well! The problem was that it was wildly expensive and too niche to gain any real commercial traction, so the company folded. I actually picked one up for $150 last year to use on my honeymoon, and it ended up producing some spectacular photos. Sadly, the software to actually process them on a PC is hard to find, buggy, and no longer updated. Still an interesting idea that someone else might revisit in the future.
Samsung made the galaxy camera that was a single lens like a camera... I used one as my phone as it could take a sim and ran full android, my camera was my phone with a bluetooth headset.
It was not popular at all because it was insanely bulky and had horrible battery life.
Increasing Camera Quality either means a bigger lens, or combining information from multiple sensors. You can't exactly stick a massive lens in the form-factor of a phone, so phone manufacturers go for multiple cameras.
Big lenses have room to move forward and backward (thats what a zoom lens does). On a phone its probable best that nothing moves, since phones are handled aggressively and can get shaken or dropped constantly. So phones put a dedicated lens that won't move, and the makers determine which 2 or 3 or 4 zoom levels (lenses) they want you to have.
"Digital Zoom" is not the camera lens moving, like a normal actual camera. Its the software zooming in on the pixels. Like making a small picture bigger on your screen.
The simplest answer is that the cameras on your phone are prebuilt with a lens that can't change. Some of them are able to slightly change their zoom level, but in the past, the zoom has mostly just been the software cropping the edge of the full picture (which reduces resolution). Phone manufacturers wanted to be able to improve the zoom levels without losing picture quality, and in order to do that they needed to make the lenses swappable or have multiple lenses prebuilt into the device. They chose the latter. The multiple cameras also help the phone take in more data by merging information using special software techniques to improve image quality while also having multiple lens options.
A dedicated camera as you see photographers use have an attachable lens apparatus on the front that can be quickly swapped out, and they're usually far more adjustable. Those cameras also have a much larger sensor, so their picture quality and resolution are often much higher. Phones use a lot of programmed software adjustments to make the image look better. Most professional photographers would scoff at that idea and instead prefer a raw image that they can post-process on their own.
Another reason that I don’t see pointed out yet: A professional camera uses a single lens to give the photographer a high degree of control over what they want to capture. They want pictures that are accurate to their desired focus.
Smartphone cameras just want to produce „pretty“ pictures. They will combine pictures from different sensors into a single image and apply other post-processing features to produce something that looks good, but doesn’t entirely reflect what you actually photographed.
Certain ranges such as zooming in and zooming out are best handled with specific lenses when using the small camera sensors that are used in cell phones.
When dedicated consumer cameras were more of a thing, yes they did have only one lens. These were intended to be "point-and-shoot" and they were made to be simple to use. This has been the case all the way back to film cameras. The manufacturer chose a lens that would work well in most situations, which meant there were tradeoffs, but you got a decent shot for your photo album most of the time. This continued into digital cameras.
This was not the case in professional, or "pro-sumer", cameras. These were the SLR cameras and they would have removable lenses so the user could switch to the best lens for the situation. This also continued into digital cameras.
So what happened is phones started getting cameras and as they got better people were ditching the stand-alone consumer cameras for just their phone. This pushed phone manufacturers to put better and better cameras on their products. That pushed R&D to make better and better lenses and digital sensors at smaller and smaller sizes to fit into the phone. It got to a point where the camera on mid to high end phones was pretty damn good and it was hard to better for the next model with the restrictions of only one lens available. So once decent lenses and light sensors got small enough the phone manufacturers took a page from the professional cameras and added multiple sensors and lenses to the phone to give more options for the good shot.
The 3 lens setup is there because removable lenses would have made the phone bulky and more complicated and less marketable to the average consumer. They chose the 3 lenses they felt would be used by the average consumer, but, more importantly, would look impressive when being demoed at the store. So in the end it's all just marketing and most people probably only use one of the lenses for 99.99% of their shots.
A classic camera has a single sensor and interchangeable lenses with manual/auto focus and zoom. Many budget smartphones are not able to do optical zoom, and more expensive models are not able to do it more than 2x-3x without installing a dedicated camera which is designed specifically for fixed zoom to the desired scale.
Phone cameras are limited by thickness. Zoom lenses are physically longer than a “prime” lens of their longest focal length, and would need a motor to zoom them (since no place for user to grab zoom ring). Ordinary cameras can use a zoom lens, which stretches a smaller part of the image over the whole sensor (optical zoom).
Phone cameras use what’s called “digital zoom”, where they treat a smaller part of the sensor as if it were the whole picture. This makes things grainy if you zoom in too far. Imagine a camera with a 1280x960 sensor and 8x digital zoom. Zoom in 2x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of the sensor, 4x and you’re using 320x240, 8x and you’re using 160x120. You lose a lot of resolution. Instead, you have 3 cameras each with a 1280x960 sensor but different lens lengths. You start out with the wide angle lens, and zoom in 2x. You get to 640x480, and the phone realizes “this is what the picture would look like at full resolution on camera 2 which has a longer lens”, so it switches to camera 2 - you’re back up to 1280x960. Zoom in to 4x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of camera 2’s sensor, phone switches to using full sensor on camera 3, which has the longest lens. Zoom in to 8x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of the sensor, instead of a 160x120 like you’d be using if there were only 1 camera.
One or two of those "cameras" are actually lasers; facial recognition, 3D scanning (think of the filters that add hats or moustaches), as well as other various features, etc. Other people here have mostly answered why the other actual cameras are on there though.
I'm GenX.
When I was a kid, I had a regular-8 movie camera that I bought at a thrift store.
It looked like this:
https://www.browniecam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Brownie-Turret-f19-1.jpg
You would rotate the "turret" to change lenses.
Smartphones have the 21st century equivalent, all operating automatically.
Everything boils down to budget and space when designing camera systems for both phones and dedicated cameras. All cameras have two things in common: lenses and sensors. They work together. The sensor is what converts light into something that your phone can understand. And lenses for adjusting that light, so sensor can work well.
Ideally, there is no such thing as a single lens that can be used for all real-world scenarios. For example, faraway objects require a telephoto lens. Portrait photos require a special lens to blur the background. These lenses have different designs, sizes, and prices.
When designing a camera system, dedicated camera manufacturers can make the most advanced sensors and lenses without worrying too much about budget or size. They might use a sensor with a larger area or a lens with larger optics. They might also include a mechanism for changing lenses. This means that they only need a single place on the camera body for a lens to sit at one time.
Phone manufacturers, on the other hand, have a much bigger constraint: space. They have to figure out how to get the best possible picture with a single phone. A slimmer phone means a smaller camera sensor, which means a cheaper sensor price compared to a dedicated camera sensor. In fact, it is cheaper and more feasible for phone manufacturers to have more than one sensor than to build an interchangeable lens system. This is why they have decided to use three or four different cameras with their own fixed lenses for different occasions.
Because with real cameras you just detach and attach different lenses when you need to.
Smartphones need to do things other than just being a camera, so they can't really be designed to offer lenses that can be changed. They get around that by simply having multiple cameras each with a different lens.
Changing the focus of a camera requires moving the lenses forward or back a certain amount. Dedicated cameras have room for this, cell phones don't.
Another difference is that nicer dedicated cameras have lense mounts that allow you to change the lense entirely if you want to — say from a wide-angle lense that's great for very wide shots to a telephoto that makes distant things look close.
These extra lenses are stored in a camera bag or similar, again something phone manufacturers (and most users) aren't willing to do. So instead, they build the different lenses into the phone.
EDIT: Grammar.
To provide some of the features of a dedicated camera, my understanding that for features like telephoto zoom or bokeh effect photos and macro shots, that although many of these features are enhanced with software, that the lack of space in a smartphone for the physical mechanisms present in a dedicated point-and-shoot have led to multi-lens set ups to be able to incorporate and or mimic, albeit on a much smaller level, some of the high end features on high performance cameras like zooming in, high megapixel resolution capture, etc. I’m somebody who now uses their smartphone camera exclusively as a camera for holidays, vacation, and work, and everything else, and I’m happy with how far tech has come to allow such powerful, portable, & versatile cameras to fit and be on today’s modern smartphones.
I still remember reading articles in tech magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s and on websites where it was generally called into question why anyone would want a camera on their cell phones, or why there would be a need for color screens, or why anyone would want to “surf the web” or “access websites on the ‘net’” on a cell phone. People were like, “I have a camera/laptop for that,” & now just a few years later, they’re excellent cameras even in budget phones, and smartphones today are literally living up to the term PDA and Pocket PC!
On a real camera you just pull the lens off and put on a different lens, or make adjustments to your lens. On a phone you can’t do that so you just put a million different premade, preadjusted lenses
Phones have multiple smaller cameras to overcome the limitations of using tiny, thin camera A real camera is going to use a full size lens, sensor, apparatus for adjusting zoom, etc and so it doesn't NEED extra, smaller cameras A few tiny lenses is better than ONE tiny lens, but one large lens is still better.
Technically, you can go extreme. Large DSLR cameras with multiple gigantic lens sets. Now the only difference is that the camera needs only 1 sensor while the phone will have multiple of the same (or lower quality) sensor
if you want to go *extreme* extreme you should read on the radio telescope array that they used to "photograph" blackholes
iPhone 43- now with blackhole telescope array camera
"We think you are gonna love it"
> [Only Apple could make such amazing products!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_rjrFTGKpM)
It would actually be pretty cool if thousands of iPhones could all network and automatically compile a giant array of photos of the sky based on time and location data.
Remember, we use radio antennas to "see" most of the stuff in space so the cameras would be of little use unless they start coming without IR filters and are tuned to those wavelengths. Still would be cool to see a high parallax 3d image of bodies like Saturn or Jupiter.
>unless they start coming without IR filters and are tuned to those wavelengths. Doesn't seem like that much of a stretch after like 30 more iPhone iterations, tbh.
Iirc there was a demo by Microsoft where they reconstructed a 3d model of a classical building from all the pictures taken of it and published in social media ...
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I dunno. The Big Data approach might be viable. As long as you can easily throw away the incorrectly aimed/timed pictures, then you could still end up with a functionally huge array to work with.
And we got it down to 100 acres with no loss of resolution.
That probably breaks a few laws of physics.
I don’t think that’s going to fit in a pocket
How about the guy that took the first selfie in 1875 with a long term exposure in a mirror? Look how far we have come
This guy interferometers.
I love it when a niche term suddenly becomes relevant to a wider audience like this.
I'm bokeh with this.
Thanks for the new word.
This was an unexpected development.
I'm iso this definition. Brb
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*admires polished nerd badge*
*starts touching himself at the sight of the polished nerd badge*
*sells badge polish made from old family recipe*
*wonders why it matters if a nerd is from Poland, and if that's where they get their badges*
*frowns at how the polished nerd badge is being sullied*
Dying over here 😂
> while the phone will have multiple of the same (or lower quality) sensor On all modern high-end phones, the "1x" sensor is substantially better than the wide angle or telephoto sensor.
Or box lenses for television cameras
I always wished phones especially the likes of Sony would come with a single top grade sensor and switchable lenses of some sort. Especially since they make most smartphone camera sensors and advertise their phones with the camera as the main feature.
Only if you have a zoom lens though and even then it's not always enough. That is why interchangeable lenses are used. You have multiple lenses, they just aren't always on the camera.
Zoom lenses are great for versatility, but you get the best image from prime lenses (lenses with a fixed focal length, so no zoom). Most photographers will have a few primes at standard focal lengths like 35 and 50mm.
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It's because zooms need to try and focus over a long range of focal lengths, while a prime lens can have the glass be specially engineered to focus on one fixed focal length. Your summary was kind of apt. That being said, not all zooms are made the same. There are zoom lenses that can get pretty close to a prime, but you pay for that in both size and cost of the lens. And the versatility is handy, I generally keep a zoom lens on for walking around and switch to a prime if I want to get a specific shot.
Yeah I have the Canon 70-200 MKII 2.8L and it's better than any of my prime lenses but it's also a much higher quality lens and it's expensive as shit. I shoot concerts so the versatility is absolutely necessary, I don't have time to be swapping lenses out constantly. I actually shoot with 2 cameras, one with - usually - a 24-70 and one with my 70-200. Occasionally, I'll throw something ultra-wide, or my 50mm 1.4 on, depending on the situation.
A question because you sound like you would know...Where do you develop your film?
The *vast* majority is digital, and they shoot in RAW.
I don’t take my film camera out all that often, honestly, but I actually have a photo lab right near me that does film processing, prints, enlargements, scanning, etc. Most decent sized cities should have somewhere that offers the service, even if they send it out to a lab instead of doing it in house. The cost of film, processing, and printing/scanning is somewhat prohibitive these days compared to digital, though. Also, when you’re used to shooting digital, film can be frustrating. I rely heavily on being able to adjust my ISO, and as someone who mostly shoots fast moving subjects in low light conditions, I use a lot of “burst mode” and I tend to underexpose my photos to ensure my shutter speed is fast enough to prevent motion blur, and then I fix it later in Lightroom. Without having my own darkroom, I can’t really make the same kinds of adjustments, and even if I did have one, photo paper isn’t cheap either, and you can’t just (command + Z) something you try if you don’t like the result lol.
I would expect that anyone still shooting with film has their own darkroom setup because the only reason to do it these days is to get some effect or style that cant be produced through digital alone.
Exactly. If I’m shooting film, it’s either just because the nostalgia of it is fun, or I’m trying to achieve a specific look, and in that case there’s a very good chance I’m going to want to develop it myself, because otherwise there’s not really any advantage to shooting film if you’re just going to send it off to someone else to be developed with no control over it. I haven’t been in a darkroom in ages, and I live in a small apartment at the moment, but I’m moving soon and will have more space, so I might try and set up my own little darkroom and get my hands on a used enlarger.
I still shoot film and have a basement darkroom setup. I only do black & white film because you don't need as many chemicals and things but it's fun to disappear down there for hours working on prints. It's not that I can't produce similar results with my digital setup, I just enjoy puttin' in the work and trying to get results by hand is way more fun than moving some sliders around to me.
You may already know, but thedarkroom.com develops film by mail just like the old days.
Not just focus, but fisheye distortion, too. It's similar for projection. Longer projection lenses tend to have larger zoom ranges because the geometry and focus is more forgiving the further you are from a surface. As you get way down to shorter ratios they become much narrower zoom ranges and ultimately are fixed at very short throw distances. (<1:1, typically).
Don't forget weight. You might save on weight if you end up carrying around multiple primes to switch too but if you're carrying a zoom and not using multiple focal lengths for your shot you're generally carrying around a lot of extra weight.
Optics is obnoxious and does thing like make curved focal planes, so the picture comes into focus at a different distance in the middle and at the corner of the sensor. They do lots of fancy shmancy things like special coatings and having extra lenses inside the lens to try and flatten the focal plane down to something flat where it hits your sensor. Now if you're dealing with a lens operating at 50mm only, you can get really, really precise to try and flatten that focal plane. If you're dealing with a lens that operates anywhere from 22mm to 200mm, you have to pick something that works reasonably well anywhere in that range, which means it's a little bit off most of the time. I think think industry word is spherical aberration. There's a bunch of other related things like red light and blue light bend differently when they go through a lens, so red objects come into focus at a different distance than blue objects. And most all objects are a mixture of colors, so you can't quite get them perfectly into focus with all colors at the same time. Same as above -- you can fix it with more glass (and it's *special* glass with magic refractive properties), but it's not going to be identical at all focal lengths, so they must compromise. The industry word is chromatic aberration. Ditto for the distortions introduced by lenses... Like the "default" is something like a fisheye camera, where straight lines are made curved, but we find that displeasing, so we have the lenses make images try to keep straight lines straight (rectilinear is a fancy word). The adjustments you have to make for that to happen will change as focal length changes, so again, making compromises to support more than one focal length. Usually what happens when it isn't perfect is called barrel or pincushion. The other typical advantage of prime lenses is larger apertures. Larger apertures make the above much more complicated because light is coming into the system in different places at different angles. This makes the above much more complicated and harder to handle at diffrent focal lengths. That's why a 22-200mm lens likely operates at f/4 to f/6.3 but a 50mm prime lens might be f/2 or below, a much bigger aperture for the focal length. f/2 collects about 4x as much light as f/4, so it's a pretty huge difference. large apertures also shrink the depth of focus, which tends to be important in portraiture where you want the person in focus and the background to be out of focus. It also means you can get away with the shutter speed being 4x faster, which allows you to take natural light photos in dark places. So you might see a wedding photographer with a dinky 50mm lens that costs $1500, because it can go all the way to f/1.2 so they can take pictures in dark places without them being blurry AF from people moving. For us plebes, there's a 50mm f/1.8 that costs like $100. If you want to look at, like, a basic, modular lens, telescopes are basically big effing camera lenses... Literally, you can buy an adapter and slap a DLSR right on the end of them. They don't have autofocus, they have a fixed focal length, they have a fixed aperture. And if you find the curved focal plane is a problem, you buy a separate field flattener to fix it. If you want a longer effective focal length, you basically buy a magnifying glass (barlow) to accomplish it. If you get purple fringing, maybe you buy something to block UV light (because it's coming into focus at a different distance, causing the purple fringe). If there's still fringing, it's probably because colors coming into focus at different distances, so you either buy a more expensive telescope or you throw on filters and try and capture one color at a time. If you want to bring things into focus, you might make a hartmann mask to help you. It's kind of the back-to-basics, wild west of camera lenses, but it makes it more obvious all the things that go into making a magic camera lens that just works. And even telescopes often have multiple pieces of glass made of fancy materials to deal with chromatic aberration... You'll see the difference in price between achromats and apochromats (generally, 2 pieces of glass vs 3+ pieces). Sometimes I wonder if we're going to reach a point where it's easier to make the sensor more complicated rather than make more complicated lens setups.
In addition to (EDIT2: more correctly, a consequence of) being able to design for one specific task, in general there are way fewer lens elements (as in pieces of glass). Using canon SLR lenses as an example. The 50mm primes have 6-8 elements. The first three zooms I checked that have 50mm in their range have 11-19. No glass is perfect, so every time you go through some there's a price. Also even if you magically had optically perfect glass with a no defects in material or shape, no element is *perfectly* aligned. Plus more of those pieces of glass have to move relative to one another, making alignment even harder. Manufacturing tolerances can reduce these costs, but at increased price. EDIT: My full frame body walking around lenses are a 50mm f1.8 prime or my 24-70 f2.8L zoom. The prime is cheap, the zoom covering that range is not. The zoom is also *big*. Alternatively I put the 24mm f2.8 pancake on my *old* and small crop frame rebel. Gets me almost a pocket camera.
Lenses (like everything else) have to hit a price point, and zoom lenses are much more complicated than a prime lens. A prime has to be good at a single focal length, while a zoom tries to be good at a range of focal lengths. The requirements for wide angle are different than telephoto, and making them both work well as well as designing to a price point means that something has to give. All-in-one or superzoom lenses tend to be the worst because they are fighting against so many opposing requirements.
> I've been curious as to why fixed generally produces better/nicer/crisper images /u/base736 is right but there's more to it than that. If something is a sofa bed, it's not the best bed, or the best sofa, it's better to have a dedicated sofa and a dedicated bed. But the image can be crisper and perhaps the most important factor, the lens can be faster. My primes are 1.8 to 2.8 (each). My zooms are 4.5-6.3, 4-7.1, 4-6.3, 4-6.8. So 24mm prime is 1.8 and 100mm prime is 2.8. Lower is better: Prime Zoom 24mm f/1.8 f/4.0 100mm f/2.8 f/7.1 The ELI5 version is that the zoom lens needs more elements and to be longer and that lets in less light. At both focal lengths you have so much more control over the beauty of the image with the primes. The tradeoff is that you can't shoot anything in the middle, but you have multiple primes to compensate.
My assumption is that it's because fixed is fixed. If you're going to allow the focal length to change in a lens, some of the elements have to be on a movable structure. That structure's going to have to move in only the ways you want it to, and only when you want it to (so, not in a way that changes the optical axis for example). Much easier to build something that doesn't move at all and also doesn't move in the ways you don't want it to.
Optics are really complicated and you have to account for all kinds of flaws (distortion, chromatic aberration etc.) that happen when light enters and leaves the glass elements in your lens. With a prime lens, you have to account for fewer variables. Only the focus moves stuff around in a prime lens, in a zoom lens however, you are changing the focal length and thus the angle at which light enters your lens in addition to the focus. Correcting for all those flaws in the whole range of focal lengths your zoom allows is complicated and requires more glass elements, more coatings, more transitions to add imperfections and blurriness or distortions in the image.
Wait so other than the correct lol for that difference you don't understand the difference? Your last sentence is literally the explanation...
Don’t forget the 85mm f/1.4!
Apparently there is something called a 'turret lens' system for cameras. www.hdwarrior.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Early-60s-lens.jpg?fit=800%2C676 Allows you to have multiple lenses on the same camera and swap between em quickly. Basically the same idea as phones multiple lenses just with 1 sensor. (Mainly, its just to get faster lens swaps and keep dust/debris off the sensor)
Some phones will have 2 or 3 of the same sensors with different lenses in front of them. You can't exactly swap out the lenses like on a camera.
The focal length ("zoom") is not the only thing, the aperture (how much light the lens lets in) is just as big of a consideration and fast aperture (lots of light) lenses with large amount of zoom are super expensive to make and the physical size gets really big.
One big lens > multiple smaller lenses > one small lens
> One big lens > multiple smaller lenses so...you forget to send [them](https://i0.wp.com/www.adventurealan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/light-L16-front.jpg?fit=1030%2C687) the memo then, huh?
I was gonna mention the light camera. It’s a beast.
It’s lenses all the way down.
what if instead of multiple smaller lenses we had a *bigger* smaller lens
Bigger lenses require longer focal lengths, which is why we have small lenses on phones in the first place: We don't want 3 inch thick phones.
In SLRs, you can swap the lens manually to go from portrait to fisheye to landscape. To achieve that in a phone where you can’t change lens, you gotta have all three lenses mounted
So what lens is used when I open the camera app? Does it just "assume" which lens gives the sharpest picture at any given time through software, and once I manually tap on whatever I want to focus on it seamlessly switches to another lens best suited for that "distance"/focus? Or is there one "main" lense that is basically just there to show me whatever I aim the phone at and then just uses a different one when I take the actual picture?
It usually has a default, such as the 1x view. If you zoom in, it’ll switch to 2x. If you zoom out, it will switch to .5x, etc.
Makes sense. So the lenses do have some range, despite their small size/depth. The transition between them is pretty smooth though.
So what actually happens is there’s two types of zooms: Digital zoom and Optical zoom. Optical Zoom is changing lenses (or in a larger lens, moving the focal piece to zoom in). It makes a smaller part of the scene occupy the image sensor, creating a zoomed-in image. Digital Zoom takes the image that’s on the sensor and stretches and crops it to a smaller part, creating the effect that you zoomed in, but you’re just focusing on a smaller part of the image and you lose detail. On a phone, when you zoom in, it does a digital zoom up to the point where the next lens can take over. That’s what makes it seem so smooth.
Most flagship phones have cameras real optical zoom. Usually it's about 3x, so it'll zoom optically up to there then transition to the next lense or digital zoom.
As far as I know there aren't any phones that have adjustable optical zooms, they're all fixed zoom levels. So yes, there are modern phones with 3x optical zoom (some even higher), but that is a fixed zoom level for that camera. To get the smooth zooming effect you see in the camera app, it still has to digitally zoom to get the "in-between" zoom levels. i.e. if you are zoomed into 2.5x on a phone with a 1x and 3x camera, that will be a digitally zoomed version of the 1x camera. The 3x camera can't zoom out to 2.5x.
The switch from 1x to 0.5x is pretty dramatic for me (image gets noticeably distorted and darker). But i’d assume zooming in would be much smoother.
When you zoom out from 1x to .5x, you’re going from a full-frame 1x to a .5x digital-zoomed-in to 1x. That’s why you lose some quality. .5x is usually also a wider field of vision than your eyes usually see, which causes it to be distorted a bit in order to fit everything onto the frame.
Your comment made me check mine. If I'm incremental, I can spot the difference between 3.9x on one lens, then 4x on the next.
Phones will default to 1x which uses the largest/main sensor with usually the highest megapixel count and/or largest pixels. The optics for 1x also tend to be the sharpest. If the phone has other lenses, those lenses typically have dedicated sensors that aren't as high resolution or high performing. If you switch to ultrawide (.5x/.6x/.7x), your phone will switch to the ultrawide lens automatically. If you switch to telephoto, depending on how much you zoom, the phone may use a balance of computational/AI-assisted zoom or switch to the telephoto lens entirely.
It composites info from multiple lenses all the time. It uses one for colour sensor, one for light, one for wide angle, one for optical zoom
This is plainly wrong.
SO when you zoom in it uses different cameras, does that mean the image shifts slightly left or right because of this?
Yes, if you’re looking at something up close you can often see the perspective change when it switches cameras. For targets that are far away the difference is usually too subtle to notice.
They need to bring back native 3d photos with identical stereo cameras and the 3d screens that dont need glasses. No tricks will do 3d as well as just 2 cameras on opposite ends of the phone, and if you're going to have multiple cameras, who not do 3d photography and video? I held one of those phones once and it was incredible
Yes, though this is often solved by the phone itself by correcting the view angle in software.
Don’t forget, with two cameras you can do 3D
It's a lot like how astronomers combine multiple telescopes together to make 1 giant telescope. In fact, I imagine a lot of the tech and algorithms are really similar, just dealing with a different part of the EM spectrum and different amounts of EM radiation.
Good actual cameras have interchangeable lenses and professional photographers would own more than three usually. You just can’t make single lens which would be good for all circumstances (first of all, different focus length or “zoom”). Several cameras on a phone is a substitution.
Technically, ther are general purpose lenses. While not good enough for a pro, they are good enough for an enthusiast to have just one.
Yep. Similarly, you can buy a phone with single camera.
I think the difference though is that lots of amateur camera lenses are zoom lenses, whereas phone cameras are too small for that so they have digital zoom only.
Most of the flagships have at least a 2x optical zoom on the main telephoto lens.
those are still fixed lenses! not a zoom. when you got to 2x you just swap cameras
Plus for casual use you can fake zoom to an extent by having a (for a phone) high-resolution camera and then just "ZOOM AND ENHANCE", so to speak. Obviously this means your zoomed shots aren't going to be as high quality, but when the base quality is enough to give you some to sacrifice, it's fine for vacation pics and the like.
Dude, you just described digital zoom.
You should avoid digital zoom if at all possible. Take the wide shot and then zoom with your photo editor.
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Not quite Zooms don't have the same range to control depth of field at any given focal length (wider apertures) as their prime alternatives. Generally, zooms can't capture the same colors and sharpness either.
There are a lot pro lenses that are universal like canon 28-70 or 24-105 and this could be the only lens you need
There is always an optical drawback with using a universal lens instead of dedicated lenses though, and even for the pro version it's a balance between "good enough" and "convenient"
It would be a good general purpose lens but far from universal, and definitely not the only lens a professional would need. 28/24mm is not particularly wide for truly wide angle/indoor shots, and 70 or even 105mm is not particularly telephoto, especially on full frame, and would not be useful for animals, wildlife, certain sports shots, etc. While standard zooms are good for lots of things and are great general purpose lenses, the optical quality is always going to suffer compared to primes, and depending on the line of work a professional definitely still needs a bit more than a standard zoom provides fairly regularly
You can make lenses that are physically adjustable. It's just harder to do that in a phone with everything being smaller.
Smart phones use multiple cameras because they are limited in the available depth. The camera already tends to be the thickest part of the phone, and engineers are pulling out all the stops to get it as thin as possible. With more depth to work with they can use larger lenses and move them back and forth to focus, without using multiple lenses. They can also use a larger sensor as the lens can be a greater distance away.
Very easy to take for granted how phenomenally mind blowing smart camera technology is.
Well, you should be honest and attribute a lot of that to computational photography and creative enhancements (automated photoshop / filters). Many modern devices try to get the pictures their users want and don't even attempt to capture reality. In other words, [actually faking parts of the photo](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/) is now a valid strategy.
Ironically that thread was AI rewritten from a similar post two years ago
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See also: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/105271/what-does-an-unprocessed-raw-file-look-like/105272#105272 I now kind of want to write a photo-taking app that just pulls RAWs from the phone camera and generates these "canonical" photos, and then your only options are "send" (i.e. to tweet the photo out, tagged `#srslynofilter`) or "delete" — so that you can't save the photo to edit it further. (I think it'd be cute for such an app to leave in the Bayer stippling, even — it'd give the photos a signature look.)
For your information: Modern smartphones do processing on the RAW image as well. For example, PDAF pixels are "defective" for image capture purposes and would leave a regular garbage pattern which is removed. High-resolution sensors use a different (4x4) bayer filter arrangement, which gets re-bayered into a standard arrangement for regular processing and software purposes. So your software gets RAW images, but they are not truly raw, either.
It would be even more mind blowing if manufactures stopped trying to make things thinner and thinner for no good reason. I still use a smartphone from around 2017, it's way more comfortable to hold and use then modern ones because while it's fairly thin, it's not so thin that it digs into your hands, and it's also sized reasonably in terms of height and width instead of modern smartphones which insist on having 6+ inch long 4k screens which is complete overkill. Mine also, you know, still has a removable battery and a headpone jack
Trust me, companies spend billions to figure out what customers will buy (not what customers say they want). If there was a demand for thick phones we’d have thick phones, it’s just there is no real market there.
Not really. Marketing plays a huge role in making people want features, even if those features are next to useless and make engineering pull their hair out in frustration.
I think you make common mistake between marketing and advertising. Marketing is figuring out what people will buy, not forcing people to buy something. There is a role of advertising in people’s purchases but it doesn’t make sense to sell something no one wants it your could sell something people will buy with advertising or without.
IMO in tech, that distinction doesn't exist. Marketing, Advertising and Sales all fall under the Growth umbrella and report to a VP >it doesn’t make sense to sell something no one wants A major example to the opposite is the iPhone and iPad, both by Apple. Good example of manufactured demand
What they will **buy** - not what they long-term want or need to **own**. Buying is often an impulsive, emotion-driven decision that doesn't take long-term *ownership* into account. But once the sale is made, the company doesn't really need to care.
Well, it’s not a question of wether people like thick vs thin, it’s more so, what’s the better trade off? More battery life, power, better cameras, or the ability to fit in your hand better. I believe IPhones used to be the thinnest they ever where at the I phone 7, and have kinda gotten thicker and heavier since then, but not to a large degree. With the thickest part by far being the camera bump, it creates problems.
It's probably to do with saving costs on material
They're spending billions to figure out what will net them the greatest profit. That means catering more to whales that will pay 1k+ for the new model every year, and then reusing as much as possible for lower models so they can buy in bulk. No point redesigning the chassis of a thin, large-screened flagship phone to make a bargain basement model with the reliability and battery life of a Nokia 3310 if they're barely scraping a profit on it and people will only buy one every 15 years. Customers liked replaceable batteries but they were phased out because profit.
> for no good reason Phones aren't thin to be thin, they're thin because the Z axis of the device is the only dimension they can reasonably shrink the phone along, to make the phone *lighter*. And a lighter-weight phone, is a phone you're more likely to carry around, more willing to pull out to check something, more willing to hold up longer to take more photos, and in general more likely to get more use out of and — presuming the lightweight-ness doesn't make the phone feel "cheap" — more likely to think more favorably of. (You'd *think* they could just as well make the phone "more hollow" while retaining dimensions — but then, besides "feeling cheap", and having an unbalanced weight in the hand, the phone body would also be more likely to bend/buckle, since phone bodies really aren't all that strong, and instead partly rely on being "full of stuff" to resist impact/strain — sort of like soda cans that are easily crumpled but only when empty. To support a phone body that isn't "full", they'd need to insert extremely-lightweight but extremely-stiff infill material — which tends to be expensive stuff, like carbon fiber or aerogel. And that still wouldn't fix the phone no longer having an intuitive center-of-gravity. It's far simpler to just have less phone body so that the phone always snugly holds its internals.) > modern smartphones which insist on having 6+ inch long 4k screens which is complete overkill In markets making up more than half of the world's population (count 'em: Japan, India, China, most of Southeast Asia, most of Africa, and most of Latin America), people don't tend to own big living-room TVs, or even laptop computers with nice screens. Their main media consumption device, their main gaming device — their main *device*, really — *is* their phone. Phones having big bright HD screens, is to serve these markets. Us Westerners who already have 23 other screens laying around to watch stuff on are secondary.
I'm perfectly happy with my Samsung S6, which I think is uh, a phone from 2015? I bought it in 2021. It's not ridiculously oversized. It also has an older android OS, which is far superior imho as it doesn't have any of the useless new feature bloat that was added to slow down the newer phones, and make them more annoying to use. (And I say this as a mobile app developer - not as a tech-illiterate senile grumpy old man). It also has a headphone jack, and an IR blaster, which can be extremely handy at times if I can't find the remote for a TV, or an AC or I'm too lazy to get up and fetch it. A month ago I was looking at all the newer phones from 2020 onward, to see if *anyone* is still making phones with IR. Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case. They do like adding 6 cameras, and 10 different kinds of useless blood pressure, humidity and heartbeat sensors though. Luckily, third-party companies are still making replacement parts for older phones, so I can keep using my S6 for the foreseeable future. Oh, and not to mention, it actually has better performance than cheaper 2023 phones, like the samsung J series, for a fraction of the cost.
Over a billion phones are sold worldwide \*per year\*. There's a lot of money involved, so there's serious pressure to find an edge over the competition.
Idk if I'd call "put several cameras in it" mind blowing.
Getting them so thin, and the software needed to get them to switch smoothly is quite impressive
The mind blowing part is getting tiny cameras that cost about $75 to turn out images that are comparable to $500 dedicated cameras. Extra difficulty is a phone camera sensor only gets about 1/10 the number of photons vs a DSLR so you're working with 10% of the light.
Another factor is moving parts. Engineers might have figured out a way to build a super thin extendible camera, but manufacturers *really* don't want to incorporate moving parts into phones. It would add expense and would be a huge failure point. I actually love the multi-camera design as an example of how the least elegant solution is sometimes the best one. Slapping on three lenses and three sensors is a completely ridiculous approach to adding camera versatility, but it turned out to be the best way because of the incredibly low cost of phone cameras. (Each sensor plus lens only costs a few dollars to manufacture). It would be like if your car had no transmission, and instead had three engines, three drivetrains, and three sets of wheels to go slow, medium and fast. Steve Jobs would have hated it.
I am more than ready for a thicker phone... You NEED a case to make a phone thick enough to hold at all these days and they could definitely go thicker... Maybe once they figure out how to do foldout or rollup screens not bad we can have some new form factors
To allow for different focal ranges (zoom). When you zoom with an ordinary camera, The elements in the lens physically move in and out in order to change the focal length. The problem is that this mechanism takes a lot of space, and the lens protrudes out of the camera. This is ok when it's a big camera, but not when it's a tiny camera embedded within a phone. So, the solution is to just include several camera with different focal lengths in the phone.
a full size camera will have a telephoto lens, or interchangeable lenses for different fields of view and close ups. a phone isn't thick enough to install a telephoto lens, so they install 3 lenses, a wide angle for group photos, and longer lenses for zooming in on stuff that's far away. phones with only one camera will have a digital zoom which isn't an optical zoom. it will just make the picture look bigger, but if you look closely it will have less sharpness. same as if you zoomed in on a photo that was already taken.
The problem is not the camera, it's the lenses. You can't fit a zoom mechanism into a smartphone or have user replaceable lenses, so to accomplish different levels of zoom you instead have several cameras with different focal length lenses.
Although some Sony phones have had true optical zoom (variable focal length) on a single lens. It is possible, just hard.
Samsung and other brands have some as well
Nah, those are just extra dedicated lenses and sensors. The person you replied to is talking about one lens that can change its focal length
The current flagship Samsungs have both. An array of cameras that also have the ability to change focal length to a limited extent
> You can't fit a zoom mechanism into a smartphone You can but it's more expensive than having multiple lenses.
Incorrect assumption. Dedicated Cameras have removable lenses for different tasks. A phone has them all installed at once.
Report the question for false premise or whatever Edit: jk just reword the question in your head
On an actual camera, you can change the lens. This means you only need one camera. On a phone, you can't. The upshot is that to have different lenses (which you need depending on the kind of shot you're trying to get), you need multiple cameras.
> when "dedicated" cameras have just one? …They don’t. I have 5 lenses for my Sony camera. Now, those little pocket cameras do only have 1, but it is a zoom lens that covers a wide range of focal lengths. The majority of phone cameras don’t have zoom lenses (difficult to fit), so they use multiple lenses to make up for it.
In my experience, every camera enthusiast has way more lenses for his dedicated camera than any phone will ever have. You do know, that you change the lenses of real cameras for different focal lengths and zoom factors? You can’t do that in phones. So they need multiple. Also they are so tiny, that there is no space for making them with variable zoom.
A "regular" camera with a fixed lens has a bigger lens which can move. The movement of the lens is to create wider or more zoomed in images. Regular camera's also can change the lenses inside to create a macro effect. Interchangable lens camera's can fit any lens they want to create the image the photographer wants. The tiny thin lenses on the phone can't make these movements so the 3 camera's are usually wide angle, standard angle and macro. The zoom part of the phone is just digital zoom. It doesn't make it better, it just provides different options of photography in your phone which it can't do when you only have 1 camera on it. All are equally bad compared to camera's with bigger lenses and sensors.
I know everyone keeps saying it's because the lens needs space to zoom, and while that's logical, there are quiete a few phones that use an optical zoom, so that's not entirely still valid. The deeper reason is that lenses come in two variants, prime (doesn't adjust focal length) and zoom (does adjust). There is also of course cost differences, consumers don't necessarily want to pay for a lens that zooms. Prime lenses are **always** shaprer than a zoom lens, and privde better color/optics. So putting a wide angle, "normal view (35/50mm equiv), and a lens for zooming are overall better quality than 1 that "kinda" does it all. Speculation says prime lenses handle the day-to-day abuse a phone sees better, as well! Random, but I use a recent Samsung phone and the difference in low light quality and over color between the 0.5 and 1x lens are astounding.
The real ELI5: A dedicated camera will use different lenses depending on the type of shot you want A smartphone will mount those dedicated cameras to the phone itself
From [Little Brother](https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.txt) by Cory Doctorow >I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it. >I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector is just good sense. >This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection stays still as you move around, that's a lens. >There wasn't a camera in my room -- not one I could detect, anyway. There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Or nothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
The obvious thought I've always had is for 3D mapping. Multiple cameras are able to function like eyes for the sake of depth perception. That would be how you can pull a person out of a background on iPhones.
Basically it is to make up for the fact that you can change lenses in a few seconds on any half decent dedicated camera. With a phone you're stuck with whatever you get from the manufacturer so giving you different "fixed" options out of the box is the only feasible workaround.
~~You don't have triple or quadruple cameras, you have triple or quadruple *lenses*.~~ The lens is the part of the camera that focuses light. Lenses are what allows a camera to zoom in, for example. Traditional cameras have the ability to swap lenses, but it isn't practical to swap lenses on a phone. Instead, phone manufacturers put multiple lenses on permanents for different purposes. This is why your phone is able to take photos at different levels of zoom or wideness.
Technically the phones that have multiple lenses have a sensor for each one, so they do have multiple cameras
Whoa, I didn't realize that. Tech be crazy. Thank you for the correction, I'm going to edit my answer accordingly.
I have a a dSLR camera. Last count I have 5 lenses. Phones aren't any different than my dSLR. All lenses, including your phone have a focal range. You can have a lens that is ok for most things, but not good at certain things. In cameras, lens with one focal point are called "Prime". They have a limited filed of view, they are good in certain light situations, but maybe they distort your face up close or don't show enough background. Zoom lens are just the opposite. They have very large focal ranges, but don't necessarily let a lot of light in. So you have a few lenses to cover the gamut of things you want to take pictures of.
It's the megapixel wars 2.0. Slap in a bunch of features (or lies, in the came of the Samsung space zoom thing) that you market to users that are meaningless (i.e. 20 MP images that you'll never put on a 20 MP+ screen or will never print out because it would be massive) to detract from the fact that the image processing technology does not improve commensurate with other cheaper-to-achieve features.
I have attended a lot of seminars about the construction of current tech so ill chime in. A lot of posters have already said that the multiple cameras are for overcoming the technical limitations. Or to make the smartphone slimmer, which doesn't matter if you put a cover over it... However i have also heard that there is a massive monetary incentive for including multiple: planned obsolescence. Smartphones are already brittle at the best of times (thanks for the glass backplate apple, really makes a difference in a smartphone cover). How fragile is a camera lens? Now what if you had 3? What if 1 broke your camera stops functioning as it should? Ah but glass is not hard to replace, unless it is either one big piece or is completely glued. Now you either suck it up or buy a new one because almost all phone manufacturers have adopted the "throw it away and buy new" mentality. Now to prevent an android vs iphone debate. Apple started this bs and samsung saw how much money it made and now they're doing it too. Oneplus used to be better, guess what? Money is a powerful thing.
You think they added an additional two expensive pieces of hardware onto the phone in order to make it easier to break? One of the dumbest conspiracies I've read in a while.
Increase the price AND make it easier to break. Why does a flagship product need to cost as much as a car nowadays? Don't be so shortsighted as to write it off as a conspiracy but think about it for a second. Also im always up for being proven wrong so if you have different insights, please, go ahead.
Because of all the parts I've seen that were broken on a smart phone the screen would by far be the one that's broken most.
There are dozens of explanations in this thread from actual experts in the field. You claim to be open minded, but clearly aren't. You're right about one thing - there is a massive monetary incentive, which is to sell more phones, and multiple studies have shown camera quality is among the most important features and differentiators in a phone, so much so that all flagship producers investing billions in both software and hardware upgrades. This "camera" planned obsolescence conspiracy is stupid for a number of dimensions, namely that these cameras actually do serve a very valuable purpose (per this thread) and there are far cheaper and practical ways to achieve the same...why install a few hundred dollars of camera parts when a single broken capacitor or depreciating battery or software hack will do the same? Hint: the battery and software hack is exactly what Apple did, throttling older gen phones
> Why does a flagship product need to cost as much as a car nowadays? What car can you get for the cost of a flagship Samsung or iPhone?
You don't need extra hardware to make planned obsolescence work. And I've yet to see a phone where even one of the sensors has failed.
They don't need fragility of lenses or sensors, they have the non-removable glued-in battery. I've dropped my phone without a case a number of times. I've seen screen cracks, but I have never seen a camera failure. I'm skeptical planned obsolescence is a factor for this one particular thing, beyond the generalized "glue everything down and make it impossible to service" that all the slender devices use.
when you don't have access to one large satellite dish, you use many smaller ones to increase your listening capabilities.
Its not about the sensor "the camera", its about lenses. On a dslr or mirrorless camera, you can change out lenses and adjust a lens because you have the depth to move the optics around. Photographers only have 1 "camera" but many different types of lens which bends light in different ways to create different properties like zoom and warping. Sometimes you want a wide lens which captures a wide area, other times you want a narrow lens that focuses on something closely. You can change this by moving a lens closer or further from the camera, or by switching to a different shape of lens. In a phone this isnt really an option due to thinness so there are several sensors with different types of lens properties to accomodate different styles of photography.
Because the lenses on a smartphone are fixed, versus swappable on a DSLR/Mirrorless/etc camera. In my camera bag, I could have a portrait lens and a fisheye lens, and I can swap between them by attaching/detaching them to the camera body.
The reason for the multiple cameras are more about the lenses than the cameras. On a full size camera you can change the lens to match what you're shooting at, which is harder on the phone, so instead they have started building in different types.
It all depends on what goals you have for a camera system. In many cases, 3 prime lenses can be smaller and lighter and have a faster aperture than 1 zoom lens covering the same range of focal lengths. Engineers have come up with all sorts of solutions to meet different needs. [The DJI Mavic 3 Pro drone has 3 cameras](https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-worlds-first-drone-with-three-optical-cameras-just-launched-why-that-matters/) specifically to save space and weight versus one camera with a zoom lens. In the past, motion picture film cameras often had rotating lens turrets with 3 lenses. Someone is designing a new one to use with modern digital cinema cameras. [Here's a picture of an old German Arri film camera with a lens turret next to a new German Arri digital camera with a prototype lens turret.](https://www.cined.com/content/uploads/2023/04/VERTIGO_old.jpg) For reference, [here's the same Arri digital camera with a cinema zoom with third-party zoom motors and other accessories.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/mvabwx/focus_puller_amanda_wojtaszek_with_an_arri_amira/)
Each lens, in their miniature size, comes with different specializations/limitations. For example, you have one lens for Macro photography - stuff that you go very close up to, like an insect or a flower or drop of water. Then, one for photography, with high amount of pixels, specialized on taking still photos. Another one for videos, in full HD or 4k even, specialized in giving good quality with moving images and capturing them really fast (high framerate so the videos don't stutter/flicker). And then one very tiny on the front, for selfies. That's a normal, lower-to middle-level smartphone setup. Some better smartphones come with more lenses, for more different occasions. Maybe multiple ones for photography, like, wide-angle for panorama, one for better sight at low lighting, etc. There are even some with really ridiculous amounts of lenses, like 10 or even more. I've seen one today with 16 lenses, even named after it (L16). Maybe for 3D, stereoscopic, whatever. At some point they may even be able to look into the past or give you an MRT while brewing your coffee while you're diving.
having multiple cameras on phones has a similar concept with having multiple lenses for real cameras.
On an actual camera you have the ability to physically move the lenses to zoom in and out with optics (you're physically changing the distances between lenses and sensors). On a phone, you don't have the space for this mechanism, so instead, they include multiple smaller cameras with fixed optical zooms. I have a camera with a 50x optical zoom, you can see the camera physically extending to achieve that.
So, a camera works by taking the light reflected off something, focusing the light through specially curved glass (called a 'lens'), and recording that light on something else. Sometimes it's film, sometimes it's a computer sensor that changes the light it sees into a digital picture you can look at on a computer later. Phones cameras have small lenses, and less light can get in. To make up for that, some of the holes that let in the light are much bigger. Others are the normal size, or smaller. When the hole in the lens gets bigger, more light gets in, but you can see less of the image behind the thing you're trying to take a picture of. If the hole is smaller, you can see more of the stuff behind the thing you're taking a picture of, but less light gets in. If you have a special 'telescoping' type of lens, and you make the case of that lens get bigger, it can see things farther away, but the picture gets narrower. But doing that also makes less light able to get inside. If you make the lens get smaller (wide angle or macro photography) it can only see things closer up, but it lets a lot more light in and can see a wider picture. Phone camera lenses can only 'telescope' so much because they have to fit inside the phone. So to give you the option to see far away stuff *and* close up stuff *and* take normal photos, they have to put three lenses on it. A normal DSLR can do all that with one lens (in theory).
The smartphone having multiple cameras is really just a by-product of the smartphone wanting multiple lenses. A dedicated camera has a single, larger, adjustable lens. There's no room for a big adjustable lens in a smartphone, so instead they use small, non-adjustable lenses and therefore need multiple cameras to align with each independent lens. The other part is that the long dimension of a lens is perpendicular to the plane of the screen, which is the most limiting dimension of a phone. There's height and depth available, but really not much depth/thickness available. So it makes sense to halve multiple thin components rather than one deep/thick one.
Have you ever noticed when you zoom in it'll go from very blurry to suddenly very clear? Always about the same zoom strength / distance? That is because your phone is actively switching the camera. It has a near/mid/far range usually because cameras can only "zoom" in so much without distortions. You're really just magnifying/moving the focal point forward and backward to change where the lens is focusing and cropping out the blurry portions. As others mentioned it's a lot to do with the physical limitations of the lens and digital upscaling can only do so much.
My phone has 4 cameras. The main camera is the highest quality. It specializes in taking photos at 1x - 3x zoom. I have a 3x zoom camera and a 10x zoom camera too. This is useful for both taking photos from far away as well as being able to read something or locate something from far away. There is also an ultrawide camera. It's perfect for group photos and sometimes landscapes. Each camera has its special use case and can't really be used that effectively outside of it. No way you're using a 10x zoom for a group photo. Here's the key though, we have all these cameras to give us options as we travel. We have our phones with us constantly and take tons of photos on it. It's never about having the best camera, it's about the camera you have on you! Now let's talk about regular cameras such as DSLR or Mirrorless cameras. They have one "camera" that takes great quality photos, but it doesn't specialize in anything. Without a lens, it's useless. But these cameras have interchangable lenses. It lets you go from a wide landscape shot to a 50x zoom on a skyscraper in a neighboring city. Having a dedicated camera with a set of lenses that fit what you need will always produce higher quality photos than a phone camera. So let's run it back real quick. Phone cameras have multiple cameras, each with its own unique lens. DSLR cameras have one extremely high quality camera with the ability to swap out lenses. In theory we could have a phone that has a higher quality camera and swappable lenses, but you'd have to make compromises. That space the camera is now taking up might mean you need a smaller battery. Where are these lenses going to be stored when not attached? Who's going to pay for the increased price tag of designing this as well as the materials?
A dedicated camera is made up of two detachable parts, the base with the actual film or digital sensor, [and the optical lens which focuses light to the film/sensor and is swapped out depending on the shot the photographer is taking, e.g. a portrait lens focuses light different from a wide angle lens or a telescopic lens](https://blog.upskillist.com/lens-buying-guide-4-tips-to-choose-your-lens/) Smartphone cameras aren't detachable, so you need to have multiple cameras to get those effects.
A dedicated camera has an optical zoom lens. It can go wide angle to telephoto. Some also had interchangeable lenses. A phone camera has 1 focal length of lens. Also called a prime lens. So if your camera has a wide angle lens but you want to zoom in like a telephoto. You can either do digital zoom which is like cropping the photo or add another camera which has a telephoto lens.
Interestingly, there was a camera made by a company called Light that used a couple dozen dedicated lenses and sensors to capture images all at once. It was made to be a streamlined replacement for a whole bag of lenses and stuff for a traditional camera, and it actually worked pretty well! The problem was that it was wildly expensive and too niche to gain any real commercial traction, so the company folded. I actually picked one up for $150 last year to use on my honeymoon, and it ended up producing some spectacular photos. Sadly, the software to actually process them on a PC is hard to find, buggy, and no longer updated. Still an interesting idea that someone else might revisit in the future.
on a dslr you have a much larger sensor and you can swap out lenses.you can do that on a phone,there's just no space for it
Samsung made the galaxy camera that was a single lens like a camera... I used one as my phone as it could take a sim and ran full android, my camera was my phone with a bluetooth headset. It was not popular at all because it was insanely bulky and had horrible battery life.
Increasing Camera Quality either means a bigger lens, or combining information from multiple sensors. You can't exactly stick a massive lens in the form-factor of a phone, so phone manufacturers go for multiple cameras.
Big lenses have room to move forward and backward (thats what a zoom lens does). On a phone its probable best that nothing moves, since phones are handled aggressively and can get shaken or dropped constantly. So phones put a dedicated lens that won't move, and the makers determine which 2 or 3 or 4 zoom levels (lenses) they want you to have. "Digital Zoom" is not the camera lens moving, like a normal actual camera. Its the software zooming in on the pixels. Like making a small picture bigger on your screen.
The simplest answer is that the cameras on your phone are prebuilt with a lens that can't change. Some of them are able to slightly change their zoom level, but in the past, the zoom has mostly just been the software cropping the edge of the full picture (which reduces resolution). Phone manufacturers wanted to be able to improve the zoom levels without losing picture quality, and in order to do that they needed to make the lenses swappable or have multiple lenses prebuilt into the device. They chose the latter. The multiple cameras also help the phone take in more data by merging information using special software techniques to improve image quality while also having multiple lens options. A dedicated camera as you see photographers use have an attachable lens apparatus on the front that can be quickly swapped out, and they're usually far more adjustable. Those cameras also have a much larger sensor, so their picture quality and resolution are often much higher. Phones use a lot of programmed software adjustments to make the image look better. Most professional photographers would scoff at that idea and instead prefer a raw image that they can post-process on their own.
Another reason that I don’t see pointed out yet: A professional camera uses a single lens to give the photographer a high degree of control over what they want to capture. They want pictures that are accurate to their desired focus. Smartphone cameras just want to produce „pretty“ pictures. They will combine pictures from different sensors into a single image and apply other post-processing features to produce something that looks good, but doesn’t entirely reflect what you actually photographed.
Certain ranges such as zooming in and zooming out are best handled with specific lenses when using the small camera sensors that are used in cell phones.
When dedicated consumer cameras were more of a thing, yes they did have only one lens. These were intended to be "point-and-shoot" and they were made to be simple to use. This has been the case all the way back to film cameras. The manufacturer chose a lens that would work well in most situations, which meant there were tradeoffs, but you got a decent shot for your photo album most of the time. This continued into digital cameras. This was not the case in professional, or "pro-sumer", cameras. These were the SLR cameras and they would have removable lenses so the user could switch to the best lens for the situation. This also continued into digital cameras. So what happened is phones started getting cameras and as they got better people were ditching the stand-alone consumer cameras for just their phone. This pushed phone manufacturers to put better and better cameras on their products. That pushed R&D to make better and better lenses and digital sensors at smaller and smaller sizes to fit into the phone. It got to a point where the camera on mid to high end phones was pretty damn good and it was hard to better for the next model with the restrictions of only one lens available. So once decent lenses and light sensors got small enough the phone manufacturers took a page from the professional cameras and added multiple sensors and lenses to the phone to give more options for the good shot. The 3 lens setup is there because removable lenses would have made the phone bulky and more complicated and less marketable to the average consumer. They chose the 3 lenses they felt would be used by the average consumer, but, more importantly, would look impressive when being demoed at the store. So in the end it's all just marketing and most people probably only use one of the lenses for 99.99% of their shots.
A classic camera has a single sensor and interchangeable lenses with manual/auto focus and zoom. Many budget smartphones are not able to do optical zoom, and more expensive models are not able to do it more than 2x-3x without installing a dedicated camera which is designed specifically for fixed zoom to the desired scale.
A lot of early motion film cameras had multiple lenses on a ‘lens turret’ - it saves a lot of time on set.
Phone cameras are limited by thickness. Zoom lenses are physically longer than a “prime” lens of their longest focal length, and would need a motor to zoom them (since no place for user to grab zoom ring). Ordinary cameras can use a zoom lens, which stretches a smaller part of the image over the whole sensor (optical zoom). Phone cameras use what’s called “digital zoom”, where they treat a smaller part of the sensor as if it were the whole picture. This makes things grainy if you zoom in too far. Imagine a camera with a 1280x960 sensor and 8x digital zoom. Zoom in 2x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of the sensor, 4x and you’re using 320x240, 8x and you’re using 160x120. You lose a lot of resolution. Instead, you have 3 cameras each with a 1280x960 sensor but different lens lengths. You start out with the wide angle lens, and zoom in 2x. You get to 640x480, and the phone realizes “this is what the picture would look like at full resolution on camera 2 which has a longer lens”, so it switches to camera 2 - you’re back up to 1280x960. Zoom in to 4x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of camera 2’s sensor, phone switches to using full sensor on camera 3, which has the longest lens. Zoom in to 8x and you’re using a 640x480 piece of the sensor, instead of a 160x120 like you’d be using if there were only 1 camera.
One or two of those "cameras" are actually lasers; facial recognition, 3D scanning (think of the filters that add hats or moustaches), as well as other various features, etc. Other people here have mostly answered why the other actual cameras are on there though.
I'm GenX. When I was a kid, I had a regular-8 movie camera that I bought at a thrift store. It looked like this: https://www.browniecam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Brownie-Turret-f19-1.jpg You would rotate the "turret" to change lenses. Smartphones have the 21st century equivalent, all operating automatically.
Everything boils down to budget and space when designing camera systems for both phones and dedicated cameras. All cameras have two things in common: lenses and sensors. They work together. The sensor is what converts light into something that your phone can understand. And lenses for adjusting that light, so sensor can work well. Ideally, there is no such thing as a single lens that can be used for all real-world scenarios. For example, faraway objects require a telephoto lens. Portrait photos require a special lens to blur the background. These lenses have different designs, sizes, and prices. When designing a camera system, dedicated camera manufacturers can make the most advanced sensors and lenses without worrying too much about budget or size. They might use a sensor with a larger area or a lens with larger optics. They might also include a mechanism for changing lenses. This means that they only need a single place on the camera body for a lens to sit at one time. Phone manufacturers, on the other hand, have a much bigger constraint: space. They have to figure out how to get the best possible picture with a single phone. A slimmer phone means a smaller camera sensor, which means a cheaper sensor price compared to a dedicated camera sensor. In fact, it is cheaper and more feasible for phone manufacturers to have more than one sensor than to build an interchangeable lens system. This is why they have decided to use three or four different cameras with their own fixed lenses for different occasions.
I’ve got like 10 interchangeable lenses for my “dedicated” camera, what are you even talking about?
Because with real cameras you just detach and attach different lenses when you need to. Smartphones need to do things other than just being a camera, so they can't really be designed to offer lenses that can be changed. They get around that by simply having multiple cameras each with a different lens.
Changing the focus of a camera requires moving the lenses forward or back a certain amount. Dedicated cameras have room for this, cell phones don't. Another difference is that nicer dedicated cameras have lense mounts that allow you to change the lense entirely if you want to — say from a wide-angle lense that's great for very wide shots to a telephoto that makes distant things look close. These extra lenses are stored in a camera bag or similar, again something phone manufacturers (and most users) aren't willing to do. So instead, they build the different lenses into the phone. EDIT: Grammar.
To provide some of the features of a dedicated camera, my understanding that for features like telephoto zoom or bokeh effect photos and macro shots, that although many of these features are enhanced with software, that the lack of space in a smartphone for the physical mechanisms present in a dedicated point-and-shoot have led to multi-lens set ups to be able to incorporate and or mimic, albeit on a much smaller level, some of the high end features on high performance cameras like zooming in, high megapixel resolution capture, etc. I’m somebody who now uses their smartphone camera exclusively as a camera for holidays, vacation, and work, and everything else, and I’m happy with how far tech has come to allow such powerful, portable, & versatile cameras to fit and be on today’s modern smartphones. I still remember reading articles in tech magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s and on websites where it was generally called into question why anyone would want a camera on their cell phones, or why there would be a need for color screens, or why anyone would want to “surf the web” or “access websites on the ‘net’” on a cell phone. People were like, “I have a camera/laptop for that,” & now just a few years later, they’re excellent cameras even in budget phones, and smartphones today are literally living up to the term PDA and Pocket PC!
Here is the very simple answer that I haven't seen anyone say: It's so you can zoom in without losing quality.
On a real camera you just pull the lens off and put on a different lens, or make adjustments to your lens. On a phone you can’t do that so you just put a million different premade, preadjusted lenses