New Smartphone Fight Over Camera Power
A new battle is breaking out in the smartphone market as manufacturers strive to outdo each other with on board camera power.
Whether this is what the consumer wants, though remains to be seen. No sooner had it become a thing, to pack three lenses into phones, such as with the well-received Huawei P20, than LG have plunged in at the deep end, by squeezing five into their new model.
The new LG V40 ThinQ has three rear-facing cameras and two forward.
Why? Well, the rear-facing array seems to be an attempt to mirror the long-established exchangeable lens SLR camera approach of having standard, wide angle and telephoto lenses in the bag.
The three lenses lined up on its back sport 45, 78 and 107-degree fields of view respectively.
That way, the same beast can shoot panoramic landscapes and zoom in on distant objects.
Meanwhile, one of the lenses staring out above the phone screen is for single person selfies, the other for wider angle, “here we all are” group shots.
This might be all well and good if early reports were ecstatic about the results these different lenses produce.
However, whilst the two main cameras are said to be good as ever on LG models, users have not waxed lyrically at all about the other three. The telephoto lens output is suggested to be particularly disappointing.
What would the market really want from its high-end phones, the complications of three more cameras for a similar price or a lower one for just those same old two well-proven lenses? I fancy it would be the latter.
