this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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I did the math for another post and if I remember right the best telephoto lens built into a very recent phone camera has equivalency to around 120mm (anything else is just digital zoom and sometimes AI enhance).
It's a relatively new gimmick, and it can do wildlife photography from afar (I got some good full body shots of deer recently), but it's not quite as good as 600mm or the 1000mm from the other post.
Yes, but there's so much more to compositing a good shot than just focal length. I'm recommending to a new hobbyist to walk before they run. Framing, lighting, perspective - a cheap phone from 2019 off eBay is still better than what your grandparents had, and is better than cameras from 99% of human history.
Cheap phone from 2019 is better than medium format film wat?! Better than 35mm film?! I dont see it.
Well, went and did research (gasp!) and found I had been lied to! Or at least to say it's complicated. My statement does have merit in that yes! The most popular cameras from 2019 average 25 megapixels, and that puts it neck and neck to several uses of film (frequently animated uses).
I still think my primary argument is unchanged, but the precise details of my statement are somewhat hyperbolic. In my defence, "better than film" has been the marketing for at least a decade and there are things that digital photography shine at.
Still, thank you for keeping me in check.
https://www.learnfilm.photography/the-resolution-of-film-negatives/
i think your argument stays. photography is a mix of lot more things and attributes than just resolution.
a cheap phone today is better than a digital camera from 15-20 years ago. but neither can stand up to analogue cameras that use film. we can extract 4k video from footage shot on film in the 80's (any film footage really, but i mention 80's because the music video for Last Christmas available on youtube in 4k is a wonderful example)
dammit i just got whammed
The 120mm lense, 1inch sensor phone
how is it physically possible to fit a 120mm lens into a phone?
Like a periscope. It's actually pretty cool.
Source
The primary factor is that 120mm is not the actual focal length of the lens in the phone, that will be a considerably smaller focal length that happens to give the same field of view as a 120mm lens on a full frame camera (i.e. the same sensor size as a 35mm film frame). The phone uses a much smaller sensor than this hence the smaller focal length for the same FoV.
Another thing that helps is using a telephoto lens design - including this lets you create a lens noticeably shorter than its focal length.
When the lens would still make an overly wide phone despite all this that's where the periscope lens design as others have already mentioned comes in.
I said equivalency, so I don't think that's quite literal. That said, it does stick out a bit and is sunken into the phone itself by about a cm.
I'm not really sure how they get the rest of the way.