Why Do Smartphones Have Two Cameras?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
997 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos it seemed
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like we were all just getting used to phones with high resolution cameras on
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them as a mundane trapping of everyday life when suddenly smartphones with not
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one but two cameras started appearing
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everywhere and although it may be surprising to learn that the first dual
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camera smartphone showed up all the way back in 2011 they didn't experience an
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explosion in popularity until recently but why well there is actual utility to
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having more than one lens on the back of your smartphone unlike some other
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marketing gimmicks that try to draw you in with larger and larger numbers so one
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of the most common reasons for that second camera is to give the user
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telephoto functionality and that is
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basically exactly what it sounds like a telephoto lens allows the photographer
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to zoom in on something that is further off in the distance you see although you
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can probably like pinch to zoom on your
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single lens smartphone it's actually all things what's really happening is that
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the logic inside your phone is just enlarging whatever image was already
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being picked up by the sensor this is called digital zoom and it basically
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shouldn't be used at all just take the original photo and crop it
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later if you need to it is pretty much the same thing so a telephoto lens with
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a longer focal length can overcome this problem especially as it's difficult to
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build lenses that can optical zoom that is to say they can be close in and far
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away on the fly into a smartphone that
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is unless you don't care about being able to carry it around in your pocket so this regular lens plus telephoto
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setup is common on flagship phones such as the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy but
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some manufacturers actually go the other way and include a wide-angle lens on the
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secondary camera instead you can actually learn a lot more about wide-angle lenses up here but in a
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nutshell instead of being built for getting a look at distant objects
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wide-angle lenses allow you to take in more of a scene overall so it's great if
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you want to get a dramatic photo of a valley or cityscape you know your
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friends into a selfie or upload a pic of your apartment to Airbnb that makes it
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look much more spacious than it actually is now still other phones put a
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monochrome sensor into their second camera meaning but you can shoot in
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black and white wait hold on what's the
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point of that when it takes about two seconds to apply a filter that will
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convert a color image to black and white ah yes well black and white sensors tend
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to have better sensitivity to light than color ones meaning that they perform
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better in low-light scenarios and can produce images with less noise now
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although many modern smartphones allow you to use the monochrome camera on its
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own to just take black and white photos what's more interesting is the fact that
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these phones can take image data from the color sensor and the black and white
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sensor and then combine them to make a sharper looking color image than what
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you'd get with just the color sensor alone Huawei's current lineup is notable
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for having this feature and this image combining functionality is not limited
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to phones with monochrome cameras either other phones that have lenses of two
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different focal lengths as we discussed can actually work them together to sense
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depth allowing for a blurry background depth of field or bokeh effect to be
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applied in software post-processing and while this effect is not as good as
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you'd get with a larger standalone camera with a bigger sensor it can still
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look pretty good in a pinch for a carry everywhere all the time device do keep
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in mind though that through all of this there are trade-offs typically the
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second camera no phone will be of lower quality and none of this functionality
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makes your phone a substitute for a higher-end point-and-shoot or DSLR which
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you can learn more about right up there even so it is cool to see smartphones
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becoming more and more versatile when it comes to snapping photos especially if
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