Have smartphone cameras gotten too wide?

"You might not have noticed if you're the type to upgrade your smartphone frequently, but the main cameras that they use have been getting wider and wider in their field of view throughout the years. While phones are now indisputably the most popular cameras in the world, most manufacturers have settled on a type of lens that used to be considered quite exotic and challenging to use in the camera space."

"The main camera on the iPhone 17 Pro, for example, has the same field of view as a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera, which is the general photographic standard for measuring focal lengths. This is a perspective that few companies would have considered using on a point-and-shoot camera in the past-it's compositionally awkward for a non-zooming lens. Nonetheless, it is clearly now a new standard of its own."

"But what if there's another way? Recently, I've been using the Z80 Ultra from Nubia, a relatively niche consumer brand owned by the Chinese telecoms giant ZTE. Nubia's core philosophy around smartphone cameras is that we've gone way too far out with 24mm lenses-instead, there's a lot to be gained by bringing things back to 35mm. For much of photographic history, the 24mm-ish lenses we're all so used to now were considered pretty wide. Fabled German camera maker Leica, for example, didn't start designing 24mm lenses until the '90s; its classic focal lengths throughout much of the 20th century were 50mm, 35mm, 28mm, and 21mm. Anything wider than 24mm was typically referred to as ultrawide, while 35mm was at the longest end of the "wide-angle" spectrum."

Smartphone main cameras have progressively adopted wider fields of view, with many manufacturers standardizing around roughly 24mm-equivalent lenses. The iPhone 17 Pro's main camera matches a 24mm full-frame field of view, reflecting that wider perspective as a contemporary norm despite compositional challenges for fixed lenses. Nubia's Z80 Ultra advocates a return toward 35mm-equivalent optics, arguing that a slightly narrower wide-angle provides better results. Historical lens practices at makers like Leica favored focal lengths such as 50mm, 35mm, 28mm, and 21mm, with anything wider than 24mm considered ultrawide. Early smartphones commonly used 35mm-ish equivalents until around 2013.

Read at Fast Company