The smartphone camera war is shifting to telephoto cameras. The focus is on obtaining high-quality photos even in high-magnification zoom situations.
Most premium smartphones released recently are equipped with three or more cameras. These are the wide-angle camera, which is the main camera mainly used, the ultra-wide-angle camera, which is used for landscape photography, and the telephoto camera, which zooms in and takes pictures of distant objects.
Until now, the battlefield has been the wide-angle camera. Smartphone manufacturers have focused on increasing the sensor size of wide-angle cameras and installing high-pixel resolution of 200 million pixels or more.
However, recently the focus is shifting to telephoto cameras. The area where telephoto cameras shine is in portrait photography. There are two main advantages to taking pictures of people with a telephoto camera. First of all, there is no subject distortion. When taking pictures of people with a wide-angle camera, distortion inevitably occurs because the shooting distance is close. A phenomenon occurs in which the center of the face appears larger than the surrounding area. This is called ‘perspective distortion’, and the shorter the shooting distance, the more severe the perspective distortion becomes.
In contrast, a telephoto camera captures a person from a distance, so distortion is much less and the person’s original form can be captured. Another advantage of a telephoto camera is that you can achieve an ‘outfocusing’ effect, which blurs the area around the person as the메이저사이트 focal distance increases.
With the introduction of a separate shooting function called ‘portrait mode’ in smartphone cameras, interest in taking portraits has increased, and the number of cases of capturing people with telephoto cameras is increasing accordingly.
This leads to a trend of smartphone companies strengthening telephoto camera specifications. Apple equipped the recently released iPhone 15 Pro Max with 5x optical zoom for the first time. A ‘tetraprism’ structure is applied that reflects the light entering the lens four times. As light travels a longer distance in the same space, a longer focal length is secured to capture distant subjects clearly. Apple reportedly plans to expand 5x optical zoom to all iPhone 16 Pro models next year.
Samsung Electronics is also planning to make changes to the telephoto camera of the Galaxy S24 Ultra. IT tipster Ice Universe predicted that the Galaxy S24 telephoto camera will come in two types: 10 million pixels with 3x zoom and 50 million pixels with 5x zoom. Samsung Electronics has been configuring telephoto cameras with ‘3x optical zoom + 10x optical zoom’ from S20 Ultra to S23 Ultra.
Instead of removing the 10x zoom, which is less useful in actual use, it is interpreted as a strategy to improve image quality by changing to a 5x zoom and a 50 million pixel, 1/2.52 inch size sensor.
In an article titled ‘Ultra-high-resolution 200-megapixel telephoto camera: the next innovation in smartphone photography’ recently posted on Newsroom, Samsung Electronics said, “Generally, the optical format of telephoto image sensors is in the relative range of 1/2.7 inch to 1/2 inch . It is small. “From a user perspective, these specification differences mean that telephoto cameras provide different image quality, color, and HDR experiences than wide-angle cameras.”
He added, “Bridging the gap between wide-angle cameras and telephoto cameras has become a key task for the smartphone industry, and the need for telephoto sensors to ultimately reach the same level of specifications and functions as wide-angle sensors is emerging.”