“For better cameras” like… I don’t see it. Back in the mid 2010s and late 2010s before the bump trend iPhone, Google and Samsung had the best phone cameras, and both were flat and with decent digital zoom and stability (for a phone). If you look at the photo samples for back then and compare it with now the difference is almost imperceptible.
That ugly bump makes big phones even harder to use and weight more now, plus if you’re one of those who never liked using a cover now I bet you’re forced to use one because of the added vulnerability of the bump.
Edit mid 2010s to late 2010s (until the camera bump appears around 2018)
The bump is what it takes to deliver the product that most buyers want. between the stats we already want and advertising influencing what we want, the best seller ends up being the phone with the bump.
If you don’t like that, you’re looking for some kind of limited edition for a specific market or cheap version of the latest and greatest.
They do still make a few flip phones if you want to go hardcore with your approach.
Sorry but there is zero chance the phone photos from 2010 and now look the same
And who the hell said 2010?
True, you didn’t. I’ll edit.
Here though, I’ll openly move the goalposts:
There’s no comparison in phone photo quality between 2019 and 2024
I’ve seen photos from the best phones in 2018 looking barely different from the best now.
Narrator - He hadn’t, he was just an argumentative wee cunt
Being an ass doesn’t make you right, also rude for absolute no reason
AFAIK, it’s there because they’ve made the rest of the phone so thin, but they can’t make the camera components any thinner.
Incidentally I think the cameras are definitely better and I have plenty of old pictures and videos taken on Samsung flagship phones that agree. Maybe not better in every way, but low light pictures and videos have way less noise these days, and the resolution is higher (whether that actually results in a clearer picture depends).
Marketing on phone thickness created the bump.
I don’t know anyone who actually cares about how thick their phone is as long as it fits in their hands.
Also nobody barebacks their phone, so the bump is even more crazy
The bump also lifts the majority of the back of the phone off the table, reducing opportunities for scratches.
Also I do actually bareback all my phones since my Desire HD.
Transferring those unsightly scratches from the back of the phone, to each and every picture you take… good tradeoff… Not.
It moves them to the edges of the bump and phone.
Depends on the bump I guess
There isn’t a bump where the lens would come in contact with the table while it’s set down unless you have a case that makes it flush with the phone again.
Only on flat surfaces
I would rather have a thicker phone (which also means a bigger battery) than the ugly bump sticking out like a tumor
I want a thicker phone so maybe, possibly, we get slide-out keyboards again.
We can only dream of such.
I recently “upgraded” to a flip phone, and I’m loving it way more than I thought I would.
Took me a bit to get back into the swing of T9 / tapping text, but once the muscle memory kicked in, it’s been a breath of fresh air typing on physical keys again.
I was looking at these just the other day considering it as an option, I miss my Blackberry keytwo so damn much!
I ran a Unihertz Titan for quite a while after which was decent enough but now it is too out of date and it was always a bit unwieldly.
I’m now back to typing on a touch screen and hating every fucking minute of it :'(
The Unihertz Titan kept coming up in search results when I was trying to find something modern with a keyboard, and I was seriously considering it. Sucks to hear it’s too out of date. This one is out of date as well, but the expectations are lower since I’m treating it like a dumb phone (hopefully some custom ROMs will be more current 🤞).
I didn’t see any other comparable devices, and this one seems to be one-of-a-kind. In a way, I’m sad that I like it so much because there’s nothing remotely similar out there.
There is the titan slim which seems to be a clone of the BlackBerry keytwo in terms of shape and size which I did serious consider for quite a while to come after my titan. Ultimately I was put off by some of the quirks that unihertz has in terms of their implementation and software.
The keyboard on the titan was very good and it was close to the blackberry but it always just fell slightly short with some weird things like how certain buttons were handled.
I used to love the fact that I could hold the shift key and tap a letter to open whatever app I wanted. Little touches like that I missed, sometimes unihertz tried to replicate those sorts of touches but usually fell just a little short for me.
I hear plenty of people had slightly better experiences with custom ROMs on it but I tried and tried to get a custom ROM onto mine and I never had any luck with unlocking the boot loader and always therefore fell at the first hurdle.
There is a project on github that took the blackberry keyboard from one of their best models, placed it in a 3d printed case with an interface to link it to a USB C so you could plug it into different phones that I thought about trying to make and try. But I never got around to trying it.
I don’t know how well it would work / integrate though, cause what I really want is a blackberry keythree xD
I’m going to start calling it the ‘camera tumor’. Thanks for that.
In a case there’s no tumor.
Modern phones are too expensive to not use a case.
If I won the lottery I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there’d be signs…
Wouldnt we all.
Almost nobody. My $300 Moto g84 is cheap enough that if I break it I won’t be super upset. It’s lovely being thin and light without a case, and so far I’ve been able to keep it in my grasp.
The camera bump is annoying but clips nicely onto the cafe condiment bowl as a handy stand.
Most civilized people put a big chonky case to protect the phone anyway.
Phone cameras still pretty much suck, but they don’t suck anywhere near as bad as they did a decade ago.
The biggest limiting factor by a huge margin is the physics of light with those little tiny sensors and optics.
I don’t know what kind of phones you are using. Flagship phones nowadays have phenomenal cameras, with sensors as good as in dedicated professional camera devices.
No, they aren’t.
The idea that you can get the same shot with a phone camera as even a decade old DSLR with mid-range glass is laughable. They’re “fine” for a social media post. They are objectively not remotely comparable to an actual camera.
No way, your premise is wrong. Photos from a 2024 phone are MASSIVELY better than a mid-2010 phone photo.
I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.
That looks like a really low light scenario but the cameras are undoubtedly better now regardless
Also I wasn’t talking about phones that old, a more fair pick would be a phone from 2017 (still bump less but with great camera)
That’s one of the two reasons for a camera bump- a larger aperture improves low-light photography as well as providing the option of shallow depth-of-field. The other reason is a larger sensor for higher resolution and improved digital zoom.
Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.
That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.
Sounds like my dating strategy…
I’m talking about more like mid 2010s late 2010s
I have no input on if the bump is helpful from engineering but you are off your rocker and blind if you can’t tell the difference in camera quality, especially 30 and 60 fps video from 6 or 7 years ago. Not even close.
It could also be a perception thing. My eyesight is frankly pretty bad even with glasses, and I don’t really notice a difference (I currently use an iphone se without a camera bump). I don’t need a better camera, because my pictures are just for myself.
I wouldn’t argue with someone with better eyesight, but I honestly didn’t realize it made a big difference.
The are plenty of situations where anyone could tell the difference, such as low lighting conditions. In low light an old phone will make a photo that’s just a brown blur, while a new phone will be a sharp clear photo of the scene.
But if you’re happy with what you have then í wouldn’t want to talk you into buying something else. The old iPhone se is a imo a much better design than newer iPhones
It’s totally possible that I’m less likely to take dark pictures than I would be if I had a better camera, so I might not really be comparing low light pictures
I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.
It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.
But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.
I bought a Canon T2i in 2010. 19MP, APS-C sensor. Had it fitted with a $1200 17-55 F/2.8 IS lens. Used to bring it to family Christmas every year for the group photo until around 2016. My cousin handed me her phone to get the family on it as well.
Between improvements in sensor technology, whatever post processing was happening at the time, and the lenses on the iPhone, it blew my camera away.
It’s actually pretty hard to find a midrange camera now because phones are so good. I switched to a dumb phone last year. Best pocketable camera I could find to complement it that wasn’t a toy was the Ricoh GRIII which came out in 2019. Got a 4K camcorder. Best I could do was a Sony AX700 from 2018.
You might find the OM5 to be a good option if you still want a “real” camera that’s not point and shoot and still really small. With a pancake lense and big pockets it should be pocketable. I got a used EM5 which is the old version of a very similar body and with the pancake lense it feels like a point and shoot with good ergonomics and lots of manual control options.
I think Lumix has some options as well.
Any decent camera with an m4/3 or better sensor and a half decent lens will blow the best smartphones out of the water. Computational photography can’t beat physics.
Edit: in good light they can get close, but the differences show up quickly in low light, if you crop, or if you look at it on anything bigger than a phone.
I mean computational photography is exactly how you beat physics. And it’s shockingly good.
https://youtu.be/3EFW_dAX9lQ?si=LvaoeAG6h9HQoKc4
Highly recommend this guy’s videos on the matter. Can’t find a good comparison at very low light, but even dusk conditions are fine for a new iPhone.
I haven’t had a chance to watch the video yet, but I will when I can, thanks for the recommendation!
From personal experience, my 2 year old Phone 14 only competes with my 6 year old a6400 in perfect light when it comes to noise and sharpness. Indoors it’s not even close.
Aside from what everyone else said, most people apply put a cover on top of their phone which makes up for the camera bump, so for most people it’s not even visible.
The answer is here, but you just can’t fight physics. Light needs to come through a lens and hit a sensor. There has to be some significant distance, in relation to the thickness of the phone for this to work. Until camera technology advances and somehow produces a comparatively sharp image, we will be stuck with the bump. It’ll happen at some point I’m sure, but there is a whole bunch of tech that will need to change to get there.
Phone manufacturers are too afraid of making their phone appear thick, instead of making the back flush with the camera and use the extra space for the battery.
Phone thickness is definitely up for debate but as someone who takes a lot of photos, the cameras of todays phones are vastly better than the early ones.
Here’s some photos from my collection I found from that era.
Unless you had perfect lighting conditions they looked like ass. In order to fix the problems you see in these photos you need a combination of larger sensors, larger lenses and optical stabilization. All of which we’re bumping up against the limitations of physics.
Digital zoom is definitely not a replacement for optical zoom. Digital zoom is just cropping your photo on the fly, you might as well just do it yourself in post. Optical zoom retains the full sensor image. You can also modify focal length with optical zoom. I find myself lately standing further back and zooming in to get that background compression for more intimate shots that you get with a telephoto focal length.
Cameras on phones are getting good enough that I don’t find myself reaching for my SLR much anymore.
I like how the Pixel 6 (my current phone) handled the bump, just one long bar across the back. It doesn’t rock when you have it lying on a table and the bump actually slightly angles it towards your view. I wish there was more of that rather than the stove top bump on one side.
I dunno how you had taken those photos but look bad lol, phones from 2016 2017 (and without any bump) could take better photos, now that I remember Google photos had the best camera with iPhone at that time
Here’s some pictures from a Google Pixel 1. There’s a reason they never advertised low light handheld photos because you basically had to take 20 pictures of the same subject to get one that didn’t exhibit some kind of motion blur. Optical stabilization reduced all this dramatically.
They had to have large amounts of post processing to make up for the small sensor and relied on AI to clean up your image. Personally I always prefer to have good source images and leave upscaling as a last resort.
2014: phones got too thin, cameras can’t be as thin as the phone itself (some technical limitation idk), therefore, camera bump.
10 years later: beefier cameras still can’t be as thin as the phone itself (and those cameras sure are really good compared to 2014), therefore, the camera bump remains.
cameras can’t be as thin as the phone itself (some technical limitation idk
Physics. Focusing light has limits. Some technical, and some optical physics.
I should’ve mentioned that. Thanks.
Most people don’t care about a bump because it’ll be flush once they put their case on it.
I just want a phone with an 1080p camera so I don’t have to pay $800 for a phone. The only thing the camera is useful for is scanning QR codes anyway.
there are tons of $50 smart phones out there these days.
But they have shitty specs and are too slow.
My guess is that they want a cheaper and faster phone but with poor cameras because they don’t use it for photos
Yeah, this is what I want. I would be completely fine with a high-spec low-feature phone. No front camera, no gyroscope, no fingerprint sensor. Good enough to run games on or handle smaller LLMs for offline translation and speech-to-text.
I couldn’t care less about the camera because I don’t use social media, and prefer experiencing things without recording everything.
So, a portable gaming device that happens to also make phone calls?
Well, more like a portable mini-computer that has a simcard.
nobody is going to make a top end phone without a good camera. that’s not how product design works.
I’m all for the camera bump. I can lay my phone on my desk and it’s slightly tilted towards me so I can read notifications without having to move my head directly above it.
Also, while holding the phone, i can use a finger under the bump for stability and to keep it from sliding down. I don’t use a case, and all these glass backed phones can be a bit slick.
All praise the camera bump overlords! \[T]/
I’m going to respectfully disagree with (not downvote) you and argue that these are the reasons I hate the camera bump. I can not stand it rocking on the table. I can not stand it getting in the way and caught on things. I also never use a case.
Depends on the bump. I like the pixel camera bump as it goes right across the phone. It’s therefore stable on its back.
Still think the bump on the pixel 9 looks awful though, prefer their old style.
For sure, just offering some silver linings to them :)
I do use a pixel, so the camera bump goes across the entire back, so there is no rocking
Emphatically disagree with you on image quality, the cameras are pretty much the only thing that are still noticeably improving between phone generations for me. This improvement is seen by proper photography review companies like DxO too.
Digital zoom is still shit today, but it was so much worse back then. We now at least have AI supersampling doing something slightly better.
The photos you’re looking at must be either cherry picked, perfect conditions, day time photography, or you just don’t know what to look for when comparing image quality.
The easiest comparisons to see the difference will be low-light night time photography, and photos with high dynamic range, such as shooting through a bright window from inside a dark room, etc.
This is all without pointing out that video image quality (using those same cameras) has improved even more noticeably since the phones you’re talking about. And with people increasingly caring about shooting video, this also explains why.
