Smartphone cameras are one of the few remaining areas where smartphone companies have kept innovating ad improving on over the last few years. In the past two years we’ve had everything from multiple camera arrays to 108-megapixel shooters to in built smartphone periscopes! And to say that manufacturers have essentially edged closer and closer to hitting a hardware wall with smartphones would be an understatement. After all you can only go so far with hardware designs until you start reaching the limits of how well you can build a great camera that’s in a device thinner than than your smallest finger. Which is why a few years ago, when Google started building the Pixel phones, they pushed what has essentially become the new defining smartphone camera feature: Computational photography. Now we could go into a huge explainer for that (and trust mea part of me really wants to type this out for you) but we figured it’s best we let this much more illustrative video from Engadget tell you what it’s all about, and how it’s made smartphones like the Pixel 4 and iPhone 11 kings of the smartphone camera game in 2019. 

Tell us more about what you think of computational photography and let us know if you’d like to see us demonstrate more of it in action (for example, how well it works on a phone that didn’t come with those algorithms built in and seemingly had a lower quality camera at first). Stay tuned for more TZP coverage.

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