Eli5 : Why do phones have a camera bump? Is it a hard problem to solve?
In: Technology
There are fundamental physical limits on image quality with miniscule lenses and sensors, so we can’t just shrink them down and improve our lens/sensor tech – unfortunately physics doesn’t allow that.
So for good image quality, especially in low light, we have to make the sensor and lens a certain size.
For a given lens size & sensor size, there is a practical limit to how thin you can make the arrangement based on how quickly you can bend light using glass to focus it on to the sensor.
We could make thinner cameras if we could find better optical materials (we would need transparent materials that can bend light more). Things like diamond or moissanite are incredible at bending light, unfortunately they have other undesirable optical and physical properties which makes them poor choices in lenses. Sapphire could potentially be used, but it’s only very slightly better than the best glasses.
Because phone manufactures want to have good cameras and thin phones, and good cameras require larger sensors and larger lenses, which don’t really fit in the thin body of the phone, so they make a bump
If manufactures didn’t care about being that thin, they could easily put a larger battery and bring the phone thickness up to the camera bump, but they don’t want to do it
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