The zoom performance of smartphone cameras has improved dramatically in the last couple of years or but still lags behind conventional cameras, despite dedicated tele lenses pretty much being the norm on high-end smartphones these days. It`s fair to say that overall, zooming on a smartphone camera is at this point still a bit of a compromise, but that could soon change, though.
Chinese camera module supplier O-Film has demonstrated a periscope-style smartphone lens that provides an optical zoom range of 85-170mm (35mm equivalent). This, in theory, should provide a more consistent image quality across the zoom range than current models.
Most tele cameras inside flagship smartphones provide magnification factors between 3x and 10x compared to the primary camera, but speaking about `zoom` factors in this context is slightly misleading. In most instances, the tele camera use lenses with a fixed focal length and computational methods are used to deliver the stated zoom ratios.
At intermediate zoom settings between primary and tele cameras most models use digital zoom/cropping and other computational imaging methods that combine image data from both cameras to create an output image. This Samsung system illustrated in the video below is a good example:
In practice, this means that if you want the best possible image quality you will have to shoot at the native focal lengths of either the primary or tele camera. At intermediate settings your images will, at least under close inspection, almost certainly show a loss of detail and/or a range of fusion artifacts. For example, on some models the level of detail at the center of the frame is high because this portion of the image is captured with the tele camera. Often a lack of detail is visible towards the edges, though, as these areas of the frame are `filled` with digitally zoomed image data from the primary camera.
O-Film`s solution should avoid these kind of image quality inconsistencies by provid ...
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