The evolution of phones

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That's because telephoto zoom is possible on photographic cameras.

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Phone herpes.

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The joke was 1+12=13.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 being a lens (I think).

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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.

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OP is a solid fella. Cropped the image but moved the artists so is still visible after the crop.

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Be not afraid

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My phone has one camera with less pixels, because that is better for low light conditions (allegedly).

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This is funky funny

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…and say “Cheese!”

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More moving parts prone to failure, I would guess

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i think we should add a couple of folds for good measure

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I had that phone where the selfie camera extended out of the top whenever you wanted to use it. It reminded me of flipup headlights. Best phone I ever had.

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Yeah, but you gotta guess which camera your finger is covering..

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That's the great part, you actually dont. The image can be resolved with the data available from the others.

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My phone has 2 rear cameras, ignoring the selfie camera. I definitely know which camera is which. One is for images, the other is for LIDAR.