Why The iPhone Has Three Cameras

Today the iPhone has three cameras, but it started off with just one. And you may have expected it to continue using a single lens, kind of like digital cameras. But this hasn’t been the case. So why exactly does the iPhone need three cameras?

iPhone 17 Pro, silver, back exterior, pro camera system, 3 lenses, microphone, flash

To answer that question, let’s consider two types of traditional cameras. First an expensive DSLR, and second a low cost digital camera. Both products have a single lens, but there’s more than meets the eye. The DSLR lens can be swapped out, there’s actually a whole market for lenses with a wide range of views, angles, and magnifications, allowing customers to choose the best one for their needs. The low cost digital camera features an optical zoom lens that telescopes out to take higher quality photos of something further away. Both of these cameras feature lenses that are changeable to some degree.

But consider the iPhone. It’s lens has always been fixed inside the enclosure. And while companies like Samsung have integrated a zoom lens into a smartphone before, it didn’t appear to be a high demand feature among customers, since the large camera system made the overall phone thicker and heavier. But this is also an approach that never became popular among iPhone users, probably because most people don’t want to carry around a bunch of lenses and switch them out every time they take a photo. So now we know the traditional DSLR in digital camera approach to lenses doesn’t work very well with the iPhone. And that meant Apple was sort of backed into a corner.

A single stationary camera lens can only do so much, providing users with one standard wide angle view, no optical zoom, and no depth of field options. Apple did their best with software to utilize the iPhone’s camera lens as much as possible, like adding macro capabilities with the 3GS, but eventually a hardware limitation was reached. Apple wanted to add features like optical zoom and even portrait mode, which gave users a shallow depth of field effect for the first time. But the only way to accomplish that was to add a second camera lens, which is exactly what they did with the iPhone 7 Plus. This new camera system combined the standard wide angle lens with a magnified telephoto lens, delivering two times optical zoom on the iPhone for the first time in addition to portrait mode.

But what about the third camera that was added starting with the iPhone 11 Pro? Well that was necessary since Apple wanted to offer users a new camera angle. With one lens, the iPhone took standard wide angle photos, with a second telephoto lens, the iPhone took a magnified photo with no loss of clarity, and with the third ultra wide angle lens, the iPhone took photos with a wide 120 degree field of view, allowing more of the user’s surroundings to be included in the shot. None of these features would have been possible with a single camera lens. By building three lenses into one camera system, it allowed them to work together and provide users with even more capabilities, like capturing outside the frame, which allows users to take a standard wide angle photo and then transform it into an ultra wide angle shot later on. This is made possible by the ultra wide and wide angle lenses capturing a photo simultaneously while stitching the edges together for one seamless shot. Having three lenses also allows for multi-camera recording, which uses all the lenses to record video at the same time, giving creators footage with different angles and magnification without any extra effort.

iPhone 17 Pro, cosmic orange finish, partial back exterior, pro camera system in top left corner, 3 lenses, microphone, flash