Although it no longer makes the headlines, The race for the best mobile phone camera continues. Each manufacturer with a different approach, they all strive for the highest quality scores and the most advanced cameras. However, there is one big downside: they don’t have infinite space.
The body of cell phones limits the possibilities enough regarding the capabilities of your cameras. Over time, they chose to save extra space by increasing the size across the width at the expense of uniformity at the back. But even so, it is still difficult to introduce features like optical zoom.
One of the solutions that started to be implemented to solve this problem, are the lenses of the periscope. These consist of a system of lenses placed in a horizontal position which, accompanied by a prism, allow the incorporation of a zoom of various magnifications. This is something that has been incorporated into phones from other manufacturers, and it has worked well.
Recently, Apple successfully patented a design for a camera with such a design. As they share from Patently Apple, it has the peculiarity that, Instead of having a single prism, it has two. This way, the position of the sensor inside the device would not change.
This “folding camera”, as they call it from Apple, would be designed for the future iPhone 14. The 2022 model he should have great advances in his cameras. And precisely one of them would be the incorporation of a multiple magnification optical zoom, made possible by a design like this.
As always, we must take these patents with caution. These are documents which do not necessarily represent the future of Apple products. In fact, they may never appear. That’s not to say it doesn’t give us some hope to see this long-awaited feature in the near future.
