Adapted by:
Ricardo Aguilar
WriterMobile tech writer and analyst. I studied Psychology, but I've been working in the consumer tech field for the last 10 years. Interested in motor projects and new forms of mobility.
Karen Alfaro
WriterCommunications professional with a decade of experience as a copywriter, proofreader, and editor. As a travel and science journalist, I've collaborated with several print and digital outlets around the world. I'm passionate about culture, music, food, history, and innovative technologies.
Having only one camera is bad news. So is the quality of secondary cameras.
Let’s face it: The iPhone 16e’s single camera is hard to defend. Whether you use multiple cameras or not, a wide-angle or optical telephoto lens is the bare minimum at this price point. That said, the fact that this phone has only one camera makes more sense than it might seem to the most tech-savvy users.
The evolution of camera systems in mobile phones has been a series of trends. A few years ago, there was the absurd megapixel craze, only for companies to later admit that megapixels were useless if sensor quality and image processing didn’t match.
More recently, phone makers flooded devices with up to four cameras—including macro and depth sensors—whose usefulness was, at best, questionable.
Things now seem to have settled into a sweet spot: two or three cameras, or four for the most ambitious models (double optical telephoto lens). But even with this common-sense approach, a major issue remains: The quality of secondary cameras in sub-$1,000 phones is still lacking.
There’s such a big obsession with the number of cameras that some manufacturers even add empty holes that look like lens.
It’s common to find solid main sensors paired with ultrawide cameras of 8, 12, or even 50 megapixels—but with mediocre quality. The same applies to basic telephoto lenses (2x), which only provide minor zoom improvements in daylight.
Apple aimed to solve the zoom issue much like it did with the iPhone 14 Pro, using the 48-megapixel sensor to crop the central area and achieve lossless zoom. For all practical purposes, this mimics a 2x optical zoom. A look at forums like Reddit suggests that ultrawide cameras aren’t the most popular. There’s still a lot of work to be done.
Image | Apple
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