Nearly every phone has an annoying hardware feature: It’s time for phone makers to ditch ultrawide cameras
Pick up any modern phone – be it one of the best iPhones or the best Android phones – and you’ll likely find a back panel adorned with two, three or even four cameras. In most cases, at least one of these cameras will have an ultra-wide lens – commonly called a 0.5x or 0.6x zoom lens, compared to the main camera.
For example, Apple markets the base model iPhone 16 with a 4x optical zoom range thanks to an inside crop on the main camera and the 0.5x “magnification” provided by the ultra-wide camera.
But beyond the fancy marketing numbers and pseudo-zoom trickery, can any of us remember whether we wanted an ultra-wide camera in the first place?
The first phone to really make a splash by having dual cameras was the iPhone 7 Plus, bringing the idea of the dual camera setup to the mainstream. It was equipped with a wide-angle main camera and a 2x telephoto camera, at a time when even decent digital zoom was not a given on smartphones.
The revolutionary iPhone
Since the iPhone 11, however, it’s been seen as normal to equip 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 usual – and presumably cheaper – ultra-wide option.
Ultrawide cameras have their uses. The smaller focal length of an ultrawide camera allows you to get close to subjects, making macro photography possible. And sometimes you just need to fit more stuff into the frame.
For everyday photography – the majority of photography done with a smartphone – even a 2x telephoto zoom is so much more useful; it virtually expands the photographer’s reach, allowing him to capture a wider variety of everyday events – not to mention more beautiful portraits and detailed close-ups.
The ultra-wide cameras fitted to smartphones are also rarely meaningfully corrected by the phone’s image processing pipeline, meaning people and objects at the edges of the frame appear unnaturally stretched out.
Fortunately, there appears to be a course correction. Xiaomi is putting telephoto cameras on several of its mid-range models, and even the new foldable Xiaomi Mix Flip has a 2x zoom lens as its only backup. The Samsung Galaxy S24 family all have an optical zoom camera of some description.
And I even like the rumors suggesting that the next-generation iPhone SE will continue the single-camera tradition, because it means more investment and design resources can be allocated to things like performance and battery life rather than a camera with a very limited lifespan. use cases.
Hopefully these picks will trickle down to the best budget phones in the coming years, but until then it looks like I’ll have to look for the best performing phones for a secondary camera that I actually want to use.
