Dual Camera: An in-depth look!

Hi Folks, hope you are having a good time.

2017, was the year of smartphones with dual camera and 18:9 ration display. In this article we are focusing on Dual Camera feature of them.

The trend was started by LG and Huawei in Mobile World Congress 2016, to capture the market by introducing this hot new feature. After that almost every smartphone manufacturer jumped into this.  They provided various features that use these cameras like Portrait Shots a good try to mimic Bokeh effect that we get from professional cameras.

So, is it a truly useful hardware feature that will produce results as promised by these companies? Lets have a look!

There are three types of implementations found:
1) Monochrome(black and white)  camera and RGB (color) camera.
2) Wide angle lens camera and Telephoto lens camera.
2) Normal lens and Ultra Wide Angle lens camera

Monochrome and RGB camera:

This type of implementation is found in Moto G5S Plus and Huawei P9. Here one camera captures black-white photo and other captures color photo, and a software combines both these to produce the desired effects.

Here the advantage of using monochrome sensor is that it captures more details than color sensor, as it captures only intensities of light in the scene.
So, this implementation can give you better low light photos and better dynamic range. But this also depends more on quality of sensors used.
Now, how they provide 'depth-mode/portrait-mode/lens-blur' type photos, the answer is software! It captures the photo with different focus depths and mix them to produce the depth enabled photo.

Wide angle and Telephoto lens camera:

This implementation is found in OnePlus 5/5T, Xiomi's Mi A1. This consists of two RGB sensors but the lenses are different. One is normal wide angle lens that is found in single lens cameras, other is telephoto lens that is having different focal length than first one.

The advantage of telephoto lens is that it can give natural lossless zoom. due to this the portrait shots captured from this type of camera are more clearer than first kind of implementation. This is because both cameras capture same photo at different focuses at the same time and this helps software to mix and produce some better pictures. But at the end the dynamic range and low light photo quality depends on types of sensors.

Normal and Ultra Wide lens camera:

This implementation is used by LG G6 and Moto X4. One normal lens and other ultra wide angle lens provide more area to capture in single frame. The wide angle lens provides a fish eye effect (curved edges at corner) at the edges.

This is more useful in landscape photography. This also helps to blur the background to produce nice portrait shots too.

These are the camera implementation done by mainstream smartphone manufacturers, and we cannot one implementation is good and other is bad by judging the features avilable as the hardware is entirely different and with different purpose. So, camera output of Xiomi Mi A1 cannot be compared with Moto G5S Plus as purpose of lenses is different so the results are.

What about single camera phones?

Apart from this fad the single camera phone like Google Pixel 2, which is considered to have best smartphone camera can also produce these results and that too in much better way.

There are some brands like OnePlus, Samsung which are updating their camera application to support the portrait mode photos (in OnePlus 3T), with single camera! So, this is all about the better camera sensor and better software, which leads to best of mobile photography.

We can say the market was captured by these dual camera phones, but is it a necessary feature like fingerprint scanner/face recognition, that can go along the revolution or it's a marketing gimmick played by companies to sell the phones with two sensors cameras and bunch of software induced effects? In coming days we can expect, the devices with array of camera, consisting one for wide angle, one for telephoto, one for low light and one for no light cameras, and a camera app that uses the images to produce various effects in pictures.

But we are getting a portrait/bokeh/depth enabled photos at less price range, so lets enjoy this!

Thank you for reading and please do comment in the comment section and suggest any improvements or corrections.

Have a nice time!