Various Camera sensors in smartphones

How many cameras does your smartphone have?

Is it 2 or even 4 but there used to be a time when even the top tier phones had a single camera and things used to be pretty normal until Apple announced their Iphone 7 plus and shook the whole industry. HTC was the first one to use multiple cameras but when Apple did it, major attention was acquired by it.

Let's see some of the Camera Units in Smartphones

The Telephoto lens

It is also called the zoom lens and is used to gain zoomed in pictures and that too with lossless quality. It is called optical zoom and its mostly seen in the higher end smartphones. Honestly this sensor should make its way to the mid-tier smartphones but OEM's ditch it. 

The Wideangle lens

This lens increases the field of view and enables to click a picture with a lot of detail but the issue with it is that it requires high megapixel count lens in order to make justice to the amount of detail it captures. Using low megapixel sensor will make the image lose clarity, its mostly visible when you zoom in.

The Depth sensor

It helps in clicking images with a good bokeh effect. what this lens does is helps to make the subject and the background distinguish and adds that blur to the background. It can be implemented by software too and nowadays its implemented just for the sake of calling it an "additional camera".

The Macro lens

It helps in taking very close up shots of anything which basically offers a new perspective of photography. This camera lens is at its infancy and require some time to truly know its capabilities. 

The Periscope lens

This sensor is an expensive and the advanced version of telephoto lens giving zoom capabilities up to 15x to 20x times. It is found on flagship phones and is highly optimized for sky photography. Some say that the results from this lens are often manipulated in the software with AI and shows details that aren't actually captured in the camera. This is a fairly debated topic and in our opinion this tech requires more time to mature itself.

The Time of Flight sensor

It measures the distance between the camera and the subject and analysis it. It then makes a 3D depth of field where augmented reality features can be used. Mastering this tech will be very tough as sometimes the calculations go wrong and augmented reality just looks bad. Some games are made specially for augmented reality purpose but it caters to a very niche audience.

This field has a lot of scope in the future and many hybrids are also available in the market. Consumers should be aware of the camera array that they are going to get whenever they buy a smartphone as the camera is one of the fundamental part of a smartphone.

What type of photography do you like?

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