Jokes aside, camera arrays are actually an excellent way to improve image capture while maintaining a small form factor. There’s a reason many bugs have many eyes. It’s more reliant of software to resolve the image, but it allows more information to come in without increasing the lens size.
Bugs don’t have much “software” going on, and the reason for many lenses is only superficially similar. On phones you want different lenses to do different things, while the bug has different lenses to look into different directions without all the volume “between” eyes also needing to be lens (I think).
Unfortunately brains are computers I’m sorry. It’s not exactly software but it is a computation. Many insects have compound eyes that allow them see in many directions. Compound eyes are collections of eye that form one large eye. This does not indicate directly that they do this to prevent the space between the eye from also being an eye. Having many eyes from different perspectives can be useful for many reasons. A big one being depth perception.
OP is a solid fella. Cropped the image but moved the artists so is still visible after the crop.
We have come full circle!
Phone herpes.
Steve Jobs: “…And here it is.”
You know, one sensor with a rotating lens selector might actually make sense?
I’ve been dreaming of that for like 10 years but nah, we only get many shitty sensors instead.
Why do phones have so many cameras? What for?
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.
Because variable-zoom isn’t possible at the thickness we tolerate in phones, so they need to add multiple fixed-zoom cameras
In addition to having different lenses, as others have mentioned, having multiple sensors enables a bunch of neat computational photography techniques.
Many camera for make many photo
Booooom
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
its the oneplus 12
So the 13?
No, the 13 doesn’t have that shaded area to the left of the camera bump
The joke was 1+12=13.
I have no idea either. The camera on any smart phone I’ve ever had is a wasted feature. I would rather have a faster processor or more memory or better battery. So I always try to buy the phone with the worst camera to save money.
I guess the question now is why does an ultra slim camera have a phone?
i dunno, but what is funny to me is that I’ve never seen an actual photographic camera with more than one lens
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.
I see you got the biblically accurate camera
Most actual photographic cameras have some optics inside that can physically move to change the zoom level, something smartphones don’t have space for.
Anything requiring depth (3D video or photo) requires 2 cameras.
Most photographic cameras have interchangeable lenses as well. Instead of having interchangeable lenses on something that needs to be durable like a smartphone, they can ship with multiple fixed lenses.
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
That’s because telephoto zoom is possible on photographic cameras.
And like modern reproductions of cassette players, I would expect this to be way shittier than the originals
putting an extra camera increased sales?
why lets add all the cameras then for infinite sales!
Just cover the whole phone in cameras. Or maybe if instead of adding more cameras, you could just put one really big camera on the phone.
In fact, get rid of all the other features so that there’s just a teeny tiny screen to see what your photo looks like and a button to take a photo, leaving more space either for one giant camera or tens of small cameras.
Sounds like you need the Quintippio shaver!
Gudim and Nazim - best contemporary meme artists!
@QuentinCallaghan ahahah
