Why do phones have so many cameras? What for?
I just got that one with the 4 camera spots recently, its the oneplus 12
I mostly got it because its fast and has a good battery life, but it also has decent cameras ig, although most people say the google pixels have better cameras
Anyways, it has a normal camera, a wide angle camera, a 3x zoom camera, and the last one is not a camera but an ambient light sensor and 13 channel light sensor (I think? its hard to find info on this actually)
People were saying it would have a full 12 channel actual image sensor there with a decently high resolution, but I guess that didn’t end up happening
Each physical lens has a single focal length. “Wide” lenses have a wide field of view, and “telephoto” lenses can make very far away things look big in the screen. Have you ever tried to take a photo of the moon with your regular cell phone camera at default zoom? The moon itself is tiny, because the angular diameter of the moon from the surface of the earth is only about half of a degree (out of a 360 degree circle). So you need a very high focal length lens to be able to get the moon to fill up a photograph. Often, in sports, the sidelines have photographers with huge lenses trying to capture intricate detail (beads of sweat, texture of a ball) from 50-100 meters away.
You can stack multiple lenses in front of each other and vary the difference between them to “zoom” to different focal lengths. That versatility is great, and zoom lenses are very common on cameras. But because this feature requires the stacking of multiple lenses, the lens assembly as a whole will end up sticking out pretty far. Bad form factor for a phone.
So cell phones use a bunch of single-lens cameras to make the lens protrude less from the body of the phone, and use software to choose between the cameras: wide, medium, telephoto, or maybe even a super telephoto.
And once they had that in place, there were a few tricks that could be used where the software would evaluate 2 or more cameras simultaneously to try to capture more information with less blur to fill in more image detail than one camera could have, with that sensor hardware. So there are a bunch of computational photography tricks that make cell phone cameras look better with small, limited hardware.
i dunno, but what is funny to me is that I’ve never seen an actual photographic camera with more than one lens
Smartphone cameras are (bad and) very limited. Their sensor is very small and their lenses have to be flat, very small in diameter and cant have moving parts (maybe the aperture moves not sure). All this means they capture very little light on a ultra dense sensor (dense sensors have bleed where one pixel is influenced by the interference of the photons hitting the pixel next to it).
So they cheat. Wherever they can. They often take multiple pictures at the same time using multiple cameras and overlay them digitally (black/white and color). And of course they need different cameras with different lenses because they can’t have a zoom (moving parts). They also heavily edit the pictures without ever telling the user.
Often a smartfone image will look better than an unedited image taken by a 5000$+ camera. At least until you zoom in and look at the colors
The multiple lenses in a traditional professional photograph setup are stacked in front of each other, so they stick out a lot. The multiple cameras on a back of a phone are a workaround for trying to get good image quality and versatile zoom without making the lens stick out too far.
Well real (dslr/mirror less) cameras have interchangeable lenses and most photographers have several.
I would say most cameras have more than one lens, only cheap cameras have one lens usually, like disposable, and point and clicks.
The multiple phone lenses are doing the exact same thing professional lenses are doing. Instead of using a single general purpose lens, they use more specific lenses based on the type of photo you are taking, like wide angle, telephoto, etc.
