Nearly every phone has this one annoying hardware feature it's time for
phone makers to ditch ultra-wide cameras

Date:
Sat, 16 Nov 2024 15:00:03 +0000

Description:
From budget phones to premium flagships, the ultra-wide camera is a modern staple, but is it actually useful?

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Pick up any modern phone be it one of the best iPhones or best Android
phones and youre likely to find a rear panel adorned with two, three, or
even four cameras. In most cases, at least one of these cameras will be an ultra-wide lens commonly referred to as a 0.5x or 0.6x zoom, compared to the main snapper.

Apple, for example, markets the base-model iPhone 16 as having a 4x optical zoom range thanks to an inner crop on its main camera and the 0.5x magnification offered by the ultra-wide camera.

But beyond neat figures for marketing and pseudo-zoom trickery, can any of us actually remember if we even wanted an ultra-wide camera to begin with?

The first phone to really make an impact by having two cameras was the iPhone 7 Plus , which pushed the idea of the dual camera setup into the mainstream. It came equipped with a wide-angle main camera and a 2x telephoto camera, at
a time when even decent digital zoom wasnt a given on smartphones. The iPhone 7 Plus launched in 2016 with a dual camera setup

The revolutionary iPhone X , and its follow-up the iPhone XS , kept this momentum going, and the rivals of the day followed suit, with the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus also sporting a telephoto camera.

Ever since the iPhone 11 , though, its been seen as normal to fit premium, flagship handsets with ultra-wide secondary cameras, and the more useful telephoto lens has increasingly become a tertiary luxury. And in the budget world, telephoto lenses are a real rarity compared to the common and presumably cheaper ultra-wide option.

Ultra-wide cameras have their uses. The lesser focal distance of an
ultra-wide camera means you can get up close to subjects, enabling macro photography. And sometimes you just need to fit more stuff in the frame.

However, for day-to-day photography which is the majority of photography
done with a smartphone even a 2x telephoto zoom is so much more useful; it virtually extends the photographer's reach to help them capture a wider variety of day-to-day happenings not to mention better-looking portraits and detailed close-ups.

The ultra-wide cameras affixed to smartphones are also rarely meaningfully corrected by the phones image processing pipeline, meaning people and objects at the fringes of the image appear unnaturally stretched out. The Xiaomi Mix Flip doesn't have an ultra-wide camera (Image credit: Xiaomi)

Luckily, there does seem to be a course correction in motion. Xiaomi affixes telephoto cameras to several of its mid-range models, and even the new Xiaomi Mix Flip foldable has a 2x zoom as its sole backup. The Samsung Galaxy S24 family all carry an optical zoom camera of some description.

And Im even glad of the rumors that suggest the next-generation iPhone SE
will continue the single-camera tradition, as this means more investment and design resources can be allocated to things like performance and battery life instead of a camera with very limited use cases.

Hopefully, these choices begin to trickle down towards the best cheap phones over the coming years, but until then, it seems Ill have to keep chasing the highest-performing phones for a secondary camera that I actually want to use. You might also like iOS 18.2 could add Battery Intelligence to your iPhone, letting you know how long it will take to charge This could be the date when Google launches Android 16 and here's what's coming This iPhone 17 display rumor is the biggest reason yet to skip the iPhone 16



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/phones/nearly-every-phone-has-this-one-annoying-hard ware-feature-its-time-for-phone-makers-to-ditch-ultra-wide-cameras


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