Dual Camera on Smartphones: How it works

Dual Camera smartphones are the future of mobile photography and are considered to be the next big thing which can make the photography experience superior on the mobile phones.

Here's all what you need to know,

There are 3 Different type of Dual Camera Setups on Smartphones:

1. You can use it to add clarity of the image with the help of “Monochrome” feature. Yes, Huawei P9 phone have this feature. In this phone, second camera only records black and white color of the image. With the help of Monochrome sensor, second primary camera measures how much light is coming from the point we focus. Till now, this is an additional duty for a single primary camera in smartphone so they could lose some details in measuring light intensity due to do the work color filtering. Hence this extra burden is given to the second camera which take care that area. So light intensity is measured with second camera, and color filtering is done with primary camera. Combining this monochrome image which has detail information about light and sharpness with the color image that has been captured by primary camera will produce rich detailed image. This is what happens in dual camera phone.

2. LG use this feature for zooming purpose. Regular phone lenses are fixed at the same zoom level, and this supplementary hardware (second camera) is necessary because phones have no easy way of adding zoom to their cameras. This camera has been provided to do this work. This will help in increasing image quality.

The dual-cam is a great feature that simply allows you to squeeze more of a scene into your frame when necessary, without the need to carry an add-on lens. On the new model the super-wide-angle now also offers the same resolution as the standard lens. If you are using the digital zoom the G6 switches automatically between lenses but the system does not appear to use any image fusion technology. This means if you are using the wide-angle lens and zoom into your scene, digital zoom is applied to the wide-angle image until the angle of view of the second lens is reached. At this point, the camera app switches to the latter. So, as with any camera, best quality is achieved when shooting without any digital zoom applied to the image.

3. The Dual camera on the iPhone 7 Plus is great and uses a similar technique like the Huawei P9 but there are subtle differences in the implementation. The iPhone 7 Plus camera come with two 12 Mega pixel lens. But unlike Huawei P9 which have same focal length for both the lenses Apple has used one 23 mm lens and the other 56 mm lens. The 23 mm lens captures a wider image while the 56 mm camera captures a more zoomed in image for better portraits.

The software identifies the subject (a human being) and the surroundings. The software optimization creates a more beautiful bokeh effect while stitching both the images.

"these were the three major types of implementations of a dual camera setup on a smartphone, while Samsung seems to be out of this race its just going to join the party with its Samsung note 8. It would be interesting to see that weather Samsung opts for one of these traditional types of setups or creates something new."