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Will it be possible to have 5x optical zoom for the iPhone in today's technology ?

D

DBZmusicboy01

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Original poster
Sep 30, 2011
1,273
2,221
And how useful might it be ?
There's rumors that there might be a DLSR quality lens on the iphone.. Not sure how possible that could be..
But no one would ever believed we could have such phone 10 years ago that can do everything it can do now.
 
The big problem with zoom lenses on a phone is that according to the current laws of physics it requires moving the lens. If the lens does get moved then the phone gets thicker and Apple is trying to make every iPhone thinner than the last, so it goes against their strategy. The other option is to digitally zoom and that dramatically increases pixelization. Many describe the current zoom as looking like watercolors.

It is hard to imagine that a cell phone camera will ever be as good as a DSLR, but like you say, who could have imagined the quality of todays iPhones ten years ago.

I sold all my DSLR equipment when I bought my iPhone and I now use it almost exclusively. I still have a 50x superzoom bridge camera but I haven't used it in the three months since I bought the iPhone. The quality of an iPhone is really impressive but there is still a distance between it and a DSLR. But every generation gets better.
 
The phone would need to be very thick in order to have any kind of optical zoom, let alone 5X.
I have an old Nikon point and shoot with 3X optical zoom whereby the lens doesn't protrude, it has a sliding mechanism inside the body. Even so, it is much thicker than an iPhone 6!
 
AlomWare-com said:
Digital zooming is totally pointless. It's no different to taking a normal photo, then zooming and cropping it in a paint program.
Click to expand...
Digital zooming is pointless on an iPhone, but my 50x zoom superzoom bridge camera zooms from 50x to 100x and looks beautiful.
 
AlomWare-com said:
Digital zooming is totally pointless. It's no different to taking a normal photo, then zooming and cropping it in a paint program.
Click to expand...

WHile I agree, the vast majority of users do not run their images through any processing. They want images to send via their phones and be able to crop while taking the image. Quality of the digitally zoomed/cropped image is no longer the prime consideration.
 
SeilerBird said:
The big problem with zoom lenses on a phone is that according to the current laws of physics it requires moving the lens. If the lens does get moved then the phone gets thicker and Apple is trying to make every iPhone thinner than the last, so it goes against their strategy.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Unless Apple gets over this obsession with thinness I don't see a 5x optical zoom happening.
 
I don't see the correlation between slr quality and zoom. My best slr lens is a prime with fixed focal length.

In any case, you won't have a dslr quality sensor because it's too big to be practical.
 
yjchua95 said:
Not if you're trying to shoot something that will fly away, like butterflies.

For that, I just use my 5D Mk3 with a 100mm macro lens.
Click to expand...

Cover yourself with honey nectar and bright colors and lay still. Butterflies (and other flies) will come to you!
 
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