What are the benefits of my smartphone having two cameras compared to just one? Why do modern smartphone like the Galaxy Note 9 and the Oneplus 6 use them?
If you have questions like these maybe you should give the following article a read.
Recently you may have bought or seen someone use a smartphone with multiple cameras and are wondering why bother?!.
Traditional smartphone lenses have a fixed focal length and aperture, which means shots they produce, while please to the eye just don’t look the same as a DSLR. All attempts with these dual lenses are to replicate functionality which already exists in DSLRs and other cameras.
Some of the functionality they try to reproduce includes
Wide angle lenses
The majority of smartphone lenses have a focal length of around 28mm. While this is wide enough to get that group shot you want it may just we a bit too wide for those landscape shots.
This is why some smartphones come with an extra camera with a wide angle lens just for these situations and instead of having to stitch together lots of shots from your regular camera you can just switch to the camera with the wide angle and get all of it in.
Optical zoom
Because most smartphone cameras only zoom digitally, using software to enlarge the image, you can end up with a serious loss of quality depending on lighting conditions and how far you zoom in. To fix this, manufacturers have included a second camera on some phones to just handle zooming. These lenses have an optical zoom built in and the phone will automatically switch to these when the user zooms. The benefit of these is you can get a bit closer to your subject without loss of quality.
Bokeh
Many smartphones have what looks like the perfect aperture for a nice natural bokeh but when you do the math combining the sensor size, aperture and focal length we end up with something more close to f16.
To combat this, modern dual lens smartphones work together taking two shots and once and layering them, while software blurs the background or foreground giving you a great looking photo
