Periscope pro review5/31/2023 However, Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra uses a periscope lens to provide a 10x optical zoom, so that is clearly practical in a modern smartphone. Component space is at a premium inside the case, so there are still limits. Although the periscope design means Apple doesn’t have to worry about the thickness of the iPhone, it does still have to find room inside the casing for whatever physical lens length the company chooses. How much optical zoom is an open question. The simple answer is: greater optical zoom. What would a periscope lens mean for future iPhones? On the right, is a periscope lens, which allows the length of the lens to be much longer, as the depth of the phone is no longer an issue. On the left is a conventional zoom lens, which requires all the elements to fit within the depth of the smartphone (plus small bump). You can see the idea here, in this Oppo image. You look into one end and can see an image reflected from the other end.Ī periscope lens uses the same principle, but with just a single mirror, to bend the light 90 degrees. ![]() Essentially it’s a tube with two 45-degree lenses mounted at either end of them. You may not be familiar with periscopes unless you’re a submarine fan or old enough to have had one as a childhood toy. You can, of course, zoom in further, but this relies on digital zoom, which is just cropping into the image and sacrifices both resolution and quality. This is why current iPhones are limited to a 2x optical zoom. Apple partly gets around this with the infamous camera bump, which sees the lenses stick out beyond the rear casing, but this isn’t an ideal solution and there are still limits to how far the lens can extend before it looks silly. This is a problem when you want to have a high optical zoom within a very slim device like an iPhone. In general, the higher the zoom factor, the greater this distance needs to be. The problem with zoom lenses is that the front and rear elements need to be a certain distance apart. This one-minute video is a really simple illustration of how this works (complete with cheesy music!). The front and rear elements can be fixed, while the middle element moves between them. But at its simplest, a zoom lens requires three elements: front, middle, and rear. The actual construction of zoom lenses can involve a great many components, including multiple glass elements, with multiple moving components. To avoid ambiguity, the term ‘lens’ usually refers to the entire construction of a lens, while the individual glass lenses within it are referred to as elements. In order to understand the benefits of a periscope lens, we first need to understand how optical zoom lenses work. Those early ones were pretty poor quality in terms of their optics, but Apple of course wouldn’t use one until it could meet the company’s very high standard for photographic quality. A trend for ultra-slim pocket cameras in the 1990s saw periscope lenses used to eliminate the need for motorized lenses which extended a long way from the body. ![]() ![]() ![]() Time has buried much of the evidence, but it’s quite possible that this was a periscope design, that square-ish lens is pretty telling.Īnd they were used in standalone cameras long before that. Even more interesting, it featured 2x optical zoom.īetter yet, it did the zoom with a single camera instead of switching from a wide to a tele camera like modern phones do. Vodafone was just launching its 3G network in the UK and it claimed that this is the first phone with a 2MP camera in Europe. There have been suggestions that the first periscope lens used in a smartphone was way back in 2004. We’ve heard reports before that Apple plans to include a periscope lens on future iPhones, and a new Ming-Chi Kuo report today suggests this is coming in 2022.īut what exactly is a periscope lens, and what would it mean for future iPhones?įor something which is being pitched by Huawei and Samsung as the latest in hi-tech smartphone camera technology, there’s actually nothing new about them …
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