Double Vision

I have recently been doing research on smartphones for a friend looking to upgrade. While looking through the variety of prices and brands, I see the smart phone market is constantly under pressure to expand and grow with current technology trends and features, such as Motorola's "Moto Mods" and Apple's new "Animoji". Brands utilize these neat tech tricks to retain their current market, a "look at what my phone can do" mentality. Despite all of the extra features, all manufacturers still turn their primary focus to one important factor: the camera.



Recently, high end smartphones are equipped with dual camera lenses. As technology continues to become cheaper, low end phones will be styling dual camera modules too. Therefore it might be useful to understand if two lenses are worth it or just another neat feature.



Generally, two is better than one. One lens can be created physically longer to produce quality photos from far away. Of course, if you have two ordinary lenses you will receive two ordinary photos. The power of the two lens approach is acquiring specialized image processing software for each module. This enables the creation of two quality pictures. Additionally, the phone will use a somewhat older technology called High Dynamic Range (HDR), where a photographer takes multiple shots a different levels of exposure to create a sharper picture. In a similar way, the smartphone's lenses can capture two photos and combine their strengths to create a improved image. The entire process is handled by the phone's image processing software. This method also helps phone's with their major issue of zoom. Instead of being the digital zoom (which most phones have today), the dual lenses can be configured to use the longer lens paired with the HDR method to improve a zoom shot. However, the improvement to zoom for phones does not make them significantly better than your average point and shoot camera.

Why stop at two lenses? A rising tech company, Huawei, has a flagship phone that utilizes a triple lens camera! The P20 Pro equips the same methods above, using one lens for enhanced zoom, one for megapixel images, and finally one for collecting sharper detail. All three are tied together using image processing software. Apple is probably working on a quadruple lens phone for their next generation.

If your phone is your primary picture taker, the dual camera lens feature is a legitimate upgrade. But if you want to by the iPhone X so you can look like you are talking as an emoji, go for it!