Someone is worried about the resolution and diagonal of the screen, someone is concerned about the body materials in smartphones, the capacity of the batteries, the platform used and much more. When choosing a smartphone, particular importance is given to the camera today, but the camera is exclusively basic. Few people look at the resolution and even more so some additional features of the front camera. Why it happens? Where to find the root of the problem? After all, the photographic genre “self” is now on the wave of popularity, and it would seem that people should choose new devices precisely by the front camera.
In fact, I want to speculate a bit why smartphone makers rarely talk about front-facing cameras. Judge for yourself – the most popular development vector for front cameras is software. Various 'beauty' effects to enhance faces, remove blemishes, reshape faces and more. Various options for auto-shooting after a given period of time, on a voice command or with a gesture of the hand – this is still there, and again this is software.
If you start remembering smartphones with a truly thought-out front camera module from the point of view of hardware, it turns out that there are very few of them. From the fresh one, I can immediately name the Nexus 6P from Huawei, which uses an 8 megapixel sensor with larger pixels and autofocus, and HTC 10, which also uses autofocus, a resolution of 5 megapixels and f / 1.8. In practice, the camera in Nexus 6P is good, in HTC 10 – not very much, apparently, they were in a hurry with the release and forgot to 'finish' the software. Of the rest, I can only recall Xiaomi Mi 5 – this device has many shortcomings, but the front camera in terms of image quality is one of the best among current smartphones, in my opinion. Although according to the characteristics there is nothing special – 4 megapixels, f / 2.0 fixed focus.
What do you want to see in the perfect front camera? For me personally, so far the ideal is just the Nexus 6P and Mi5. In the first, everything is fine, both software and hardware, in the second, the technical part is ordinary, but, apparently, they tried very hard to bring to mind the software for the front camera. Of course, in the best case, you want the front camera to have a sane resolution, from 5 megapixels, f / 1.8 aperture for shooting in low light, auto focus and oversized pixels, and that all this together works well. As for the software part and the camera interface, now, in my opinion, everything is not bad with these moments.
What do you think, dear readers, do manufacturers need to pay more attention to front cameras, and if so, in what direction to develop them?