Benefits of triple camera phones over single camera phones

• Triple cameras phones are the new norm.
  
• The most popular application of the third camera is the wide angle lens increase the scope of a camera’s view.
  
• The triple camera has been popular for increasing a phone’s zooming capabilities.
  

Phones with multiple cameras are the new norm. There’s hardly a phone launched that sports a single camera. Some smartphones even sport upto six cameras, like the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

What started out as an endeavour to deliver bokeh or depth to images on dual camera phones — where the background is blurred but the face in focus — is now evolving into triple cameras.

The third camera setup that’s starting to appear on every smartphone is normally being used to enhance a phone’s zooming capabilities or capture more details in a single frame.

Even though the wide angle lens is the most popular choice for the third camera, there are other use cases as well.

Capturing more

Having a wide angle camera sensor, or in some cases an ultra-wide angle sensor, means that you can switch between how much of the scene is being captured.

For example, if you’re trying to capture a landscape, switching over to a wider angle will increase the area being captured by the camera.

Zooming in

Another use of the triple camera setup is giving smartphones greater capacity to zoom in. For instance, the recently launched Oppo Reno 2 boasts of 20x zoom. Last year, Huawei started the trend with the Huawei P20 Pro that had 3x zoom.

This doesn’t only mean enhancing a camera’s digital zoom — which only blurs the image as you get closer. It can also enhance a camera’s optical zoom to avoid loss in detail.

Most smartphones deliver a combination of both.

The monochrome sensor

In some triple camera cases, the additional camera is used to improve photography in low light conditions.

Putting in a monochrome sensor makes cameras more sensitive to light. They are better to detect contrast and differentiate between different gradients of light and dark. This also means that the edges of objects in images will be clearer.

A monochrome sensor also delivers better image stability. Most smartphones today come with image stabilisation software, but it can only do so much.

Benefits of a triple camera

The more lenses you have, the more pixels are being captured. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the photo quality will be better but it does mean that the photo will be larger allowing you to crop without hassle.

A triple camera setup on smartphones also improves the quality of bokeh and depth detection found on dual camera phones.