With the launch of this year's mobile flagship new products, many people have recently been discussing a very interesting topic, that is, the telephoto camera seems to have become a burden on the mobile phone? People who support this view have counted several crimes of mobile phone telephoto cameras, such as causing mobile phones to thicken, causing mobile phones to be expensive, leading to unstable mobile phone supply, etc., and the most critical thing is that many people emphasize that the telephoto of mobile phones is actually useless. Is this really the case? Telephoto camera is useless? So let's see what the telephoto can do.
Today's mobile phone cameras are a combination of multiple different focal length schemes, usually a main camera, an ultra-wide angle, and one or two telephoto. And a lot of changes have emerged from this. Generally speaking, if the main camera is 27mm, it will choose an 85mm 3X telephoto, if it is a high-end image flagship, it will also be equipped with a 135mm or 270mm periscope telephoto, and now the new solution is equipped with 50mm, that is, 2X telephoto is called a portrait camera, or equipped with 3.5X like Huawei P50, and optimize the image quality of the 95mm to 135mm focal length through the algorithm.
Through this comparison, it is not difficult to find that the main camera and ultra-wide angle in the mobile phone's camera are basically only the number of upgraded pixels, and other changes are not much. The telephoto camera is constantly changing, which is because different mobile phone brands understand the shooting and different optimization strategies are basically reflected in the telephoto camera. It can be said that every mobile phone brand has put a lot of effort into telephoto cameras, and has been trying various combinations for many years. If mobile phone brands have been trying so hard for years to verify that telephoto is useless, no one will believe it.
Ultra-wide angle and telephoto are two different directional extensions of the phone camera. The ultra-wide angle is responsible for expanding the field of vision and broadening our horizons, and the telephoto is responsible for narrowing the distance between us and things, so that we can see the small things. Whether it's an airplane or an insect, these are things we can't easily approach. In the past two years, the explosive popular bird shooting boom has also made the telephoto an absolute main force in the hands of photography enthusiasts, and the role of the telephoto camera on mobile phones is also about the same.
Why have mobile phone brands been trying to explore at the telephoto end? Because of the ultra-wide angle piece, in addition to making the field of vision a little larger without distortion, it seems that there is no clear evolutionary direction. Recently, some mobile phones have begun to be equipped with fisheye cameras, which may be counted as another exploration at the ultra-wide end. If not, the ultra-wide angle presents us with only a wider field of vision, but not really as wide as the human eye. It can be said that the ultra-wide angle brings nothing but a large field of view. But telephoto is different, it can better reflect the value of the camera module.
For those who like to shoot, the ultra-wide-angle recording is so rich that it is difficult to carefully discern what is contained in it. Telephoto will make specific things more concrete, to put it bluntly, it is to make the photo have focus and theme. There is only one way to present the theme of the ultra-wide angle, that is, cropping, different cropping is actually equivalent to different telephoto effects, and will also cause a decline in image quality, so why don't I shoot with telephoto.
So when we're clear about the subject we want to shoot, using telephoto is obviously more reliable than using ultra-wide angle. That's why we derived the 2X telephoto that shoots people, the 3X telephoto that magnifies the subject, the 10X telephoto that shoots at a longer distance, so that the 100X+ telephoto that seems useless is so much that it seems useless. In a sense, telephoto is the enhancement of human eye vision, let us see some things that the naked eye can not clearly see, ultra-wide angle camera has this property? There seems to be, and it seems not.
Why are telephoto photos sometimes more appealing? Because if there is no telephoto, we have to press the shutter in a position where human beings are difficult to reach, and at the same time, telephoto shooting should also plan which scenes should appear in the photo and which should not appear, and integrate the creative elements into the photo, which is the moment when the mobile phone is really close to the camera, not just stacking pixels to "kill SLR". So with the telephoto mobile phone, it is easier for users to feel the fun of shooting.
In addition, the telephoto has some more special gameplay. Why do some people shoot the moon so big? Because you can use telephoto to zoom in on the moon a little when shooting, but this is still a considerable test for mobile phones. You can also use the optical characteristics of the telephoto camera to compress the space, such as evaluating the photos taken by Jun at the Zhaohua Gate of the Forbidden City, which just uses this function, compressing many doors that were originally far away in a space that does not look too deep.
In fact, this is also another benefit of mobile telephoto shooting. The width of the street at this entrance simply does not allow traditional cameras to set up telephoto lenses to take into account the field of view, compared to mobile phones can easily do. Now that you've picked up your phone, try a telephoto camera.
In addition, it is the clichéd content, the physical depth of field effect brought by telephoto, but it is not easy to simulate by "computational photography". So even for everyday shooting, 2X and 3X telephoto cameras, although they may be weaker in size, tend to produce better visual effects than the main camera.
I said a lot of examples earlier, mainly to share the value of telephoto to prove that telephoto is actually more useful. Another example that proves telephoto is more useful is the shooting interface of a mobile phone. Now any mobile phone, on the interface has a shortcut button that can switch to the telephoto camera at will, just need to click on the line. Since the telephoto is useless, why not remove this as well? So whether the telephoto is useful or not, in fact, everyone has the answer.