eli5: What is the purpose and/or advantage of multiple cameras and lenses on a phone?

Question

As the title suggests, I don’t understand how this works.

In: 41

Answer 1

Different cameras have different lenses with different qualities. Some have wide angle lenses, some have telephoto lenses, some may be black&white only but higher resolution (since it doesn’t need colour data), and so on.

This gives the phone’s software multiple different views of the same image, and allowing it to produce a better image in the long run. The black and white camera really gets sharp detail, the telephoto lens gets good information for what you’re looking right at, and so on. Put that all together to make a better photo.

These lenses can’t be replaced, don’t move, etc on their own. They’re effectively permanent. So just having telephoto and wide-angle options on the same phone at the same time is an interesting problem. This is the solution.