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Samsung is the BIGGEST smartphone manufacturer in the WORLD, and they also manufacture parts for other smartphones, such as providing Super AMOLED screens to iPhones now. Samsung also have been partners with Apple, ironically despite their early rivalry, selling Apple memory RAM chips for their phones and computers. Samsung is incredibly successful and dominates the world market of smartphones (but in the USA, Apple dominates the USA market). LG is their cousin, both are South Korean and are very successful electronics manufacturers.. LG, like Samsung, also occasionally provide parts for other smartphones, including building an entire phone for Google (the Pixel 2 XL) and providing LCD panels for Apple. They are a very successful TV and air conditioner manufacturer as well, just like Samsung. The thing is, Samsung is a GIANT compared to LG, and even the CEO of Samsung went to jail for bribery and I believe the Korean president also was arrested (correct me if I'm wrong) though the Samsung CEO was released eventually.Samsung invested very early on Super AMOLED screens and today currently owns most of the market share for AMOLED. Fun fact, Samsung makes more money selling iPhone parts to Apple than actually from their own Samsung Galaxy phones. This shows that Samsung is very good at business and is a business monster and manufacturer.Silicon Valley is the home of all the tech giants.. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tesla, and other computer or tech companies.. Samsung actually has a branch in Silicon Valley and hired the brains of Silicon Valley engineers to help write software and develop or research for their products. LG does NOT have a dedicated branch or campus. Compared to Google, Google has their own zip code on their huge campus in Mountain View and provides bicycles for people to travel from one place on the campus to another. Again, LG is small in comparison to the other smartphone giants and they still struggle to survive in an industry where tech giants rule and dominate.. some are “too big to fail” like Google whom probably spends more money actually creating their phones than make money from it. LG is small enough to fail and they only have limited resources compared to the other big giants..Google in fact is an advertising company so they have very strong marketing power and money to spend on it (probably unlimited marketing power). Most people agree that LG doesn't spend enough on marketing.. I don't blame them because they aren't giants like Google or Samsung. LG still is surviving in the smartphone industry, mostly because they also make money selling phone parts, TVs, monitors, refrigerators, air conditioners, etc. Another thing is price: a lot of people complain that LG is “too expensive” and “lose value fast”.. however they don't realize that LG manufactures phones in Korea.. meaning their standard of pay for their factory workers is not the same as a Chinese sweatshop, which can afford much more aggressive pricing. They still have a very competitive price point however, more affordable than the top 3 giants (Apple, Google, Samsung). So this is why they simply can't drop millions of dollars easily on advertising.. they actually hired Joseph Gordon Levitt to advertise the content creation ability of their LG V series, which probably wasn't enough to push it. Thankfully, after the Galaxy Note 7 battery exploding scandal, LG made lots of money selling their LG V20 since many people had to return their Note 7.LG is doing pretty well compared to before, they have come a very long way.. yes, they've made plenty of mistakes, just like other manufactures do.. their LG G5 modular design was an absolute fail and they fired everyone who was involved in that team. If you compared their newest phone now to 5 years ago, you can agree they really stepped up their game. LG was actually FIRST to include certain features or designs. For example, LG was one of the FIRST to make the “bezelless” design cool and popular.. starting with their LG G2. LG created the first curved screen phone with the LG G Flex. They were the first to include a WIDE ANGLE camera, which we're now starting to see other phones include.LG continues to innovate, creating phones for different types of people and they try to stand out from the rest. Most of LG's target market are mostly enthusiasts, content creators, audiophiles, or simply people who demand more from their smartphone. The LG V series is targeted at content creators because of their main focus on video recording quality.. their microphone audio recorder is actually the best in any smartphone. The headphone jack still remains a favorite among music lovers.. and with the Quad DAC built in, it is hands down the best portable music listening device in the world.LG is taking its time.. they are no match for these other giants, but slowly they are convincing others and gaining attention. Smartphones are getting boring, and people are starting to not care about the physical appearance of a phone anymore as the novelty dies out overtime. People want MORE and demand more from their smartphones, not less. Manufacturers are starting to REMOVE features and include LESS, recycling the same designs or not really adding any new or useful features, instead focus on creating “hype” to make money from gimmicky features or designs. LG is often “bullied” or made fun of because they are considered “the little guy”.. LG is STILL to this day battling the internet trolling of their previous mistakes of having their LG G4 and V10 “bootlooping”, regardless of LG actually owning up to it and fixing all affected phones for FREE and now including 2 year warranties on their newest flagship phones, something that has never been done.Again, in summary, LG is smaller in comparison to Samsung.. they do not have the same “muscle power” or marketing power and resources like Samsung. Samsung has multiple branches and offices around the world and in the USA.. LG does not and are headquarted in South Korea. Samsung each year holds an “unpacking” event where they showcase their nearest phones.. LG does not have that kind of money to hold such a big event. Samsung also has their own mini pop-up stores and dedicated sales people inside Best Buy, not only providing free in person customer service but also help push sales for Samsung. LG also can't compete with Google's extremely powerful marketing campaign.. where Google has tons of “sponsors” that helps spread the word and create hype for their smartphones. Some words of encouragement: at least LG is sold in ALL major carrier stores such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. so that right there shows that LG is still IN THE TOP 5 of the USA's smartphone market. Chinese phones are mostly banned from being sold in stores so they don't really have much of a chance (Huawei is now banned, ZTE is temporarily banned, OnePlus is only online sold mostly to a small amount of people). HTC is doing VERY BAD and I'm surprised they are still around.. Motorola is owned by Chinese company, Lenovo which helps keep their smartphone business alive. Google had purchased both a little bit of HTC and one time totally all of Motorola, only to TAKE THEIR PATENTS, and then dumped them in the trash.. this shows how much Google LACKS innovation and LG continues to PUSH BOUNDARIES and TAKE RISKS despite being “the smaller guy”, which with that kind of bravery and dedication, doesn't seem so “little” anymore.

There are a couple of different uses of dual smartphone cameras. And yes, they are dual cameras: two complete camera modules. In most cases, they can both shoot simultaneously, and that’s actually a part of their appeal, and a feature that’s being relied up for computational photography.The first modern smartphone with a dual camera was LG’s Optimus 3D in 2007. This phone had two matched 5Mpixel cameras placed a bit apart, and it shot stereoscopic photos and video, kind of jumping on the short-lived 3D fad of the late 2000s. The phone also has a “parallex barrier” screen, for a glasses-free “3D” effect. There were a few other 3D camera phones in that era.In 2014, HTC released the HTC One 8, which had one 4MPixel large-pixel camera with a 28mm-equivalent f/2.0 lens, and one smaller 2Mpixel camera. The second camera was used primarily as a focusing assistant, but also to build depth maps. The parallax between the two cameras allowed the HTC software to calculate relative distance to objects in a shot, similar to the way an optical rangefinder works. They processed both images to create a depth map, an idea of where each object in an image is relative to each other: a depth map. This is then used to artificially lessen the depth-of-field of the main camera image… software can blur (eg, defocus) the more distant objects, delivering the effect of a shallow depth-of-field, which is only really possible optically on a large sensor camera with wide aperture and/or with a telephoto lens. The effect wasn’t particularly good, but others improved upon it.HTC also used the dual camera approach in 2015’s HTC M9+, replacing the large-pixel sensor with a tiny pixel, 20Mpixel Toshiba sensor with f/2.2, 27.8mm equivalent lens. However, the secondary camera proved less of a boost to focus accuracy than they had hoped, and they ultimately dropped the second camera in favor of a laser rangefinder later that year.Also in 2014, Huawei released the Honor 6 Plus with dual 8Mpixel cameras. One camera has an f/2.0 lens and functions at the main camera, the other an f/2.4 lens with fixed focus, which functions as a parallax camera to calculate depth maps. As well as managing the artificial aperture via depth map, they’re also doing some degree of image fusion, claiming to deliver higher resolution and better low light performance than one would see with a single sensor.Why not just double the size of the sensor? A larger sensor would require not just a larger lens, but a longer focal length lens for the same image angle of coverage. That’s certainly been done in more recent phones, but it usually results in a “camera hump”. Keep in mind, these camera modules typically run $10-$25 each, including lens and everything. It’s not incredibly expensive to include two cheaper, smaller cameras over a single larger, more expensive camera.Not a back-facing camera, but also in 2015, LG introduced a dual front-facing camera in the V10 (my current phone). The difference here is that it’s basically the same camera, but with different lenses. It’s useful to note that pretty much all lenses on smartphones are, in normal photographic terms, wide angle lenses. The standard for focal lenghts is based on 35mm “full frame” cameras, that’s what everyone in photography uses for comparison. A 50mm lens is a “normal” lens, corresponding roughly to your eye’s view. Most wide-angle lenses run from 24mm-35mm, and ultra-wide from around 10mm-24mm. Wider than that and you probaly have a fisheye lens.So anyway, it’s “normal” for a smartphone to have a wide angle lens, usually in the 26–30mm equivalent range, with selfie cameras often a bit wider. So I’m calling these wide/normal, just to keep thing clear. So on the V10, one of these cameras your typical wide/normal “selfie” camera, in this case about a 25.5mm equivalent. The other is an ultra- wide angle lens, about 12mm equivalent, with the intent, perhaps, of eliminating selfie sticks? Not the reason I own this phone, but you will see this approach again, on the back.In fact, LG’s very next phone, early 2016’s LG G5, moved the dual cameras around to the back, but kept the “wide/normal” and “very wide” approach. This mates a 16MPixel IMX234, 1/2.6″ sensor with f/1.8, 29mm equivalent lens — similar to the V10 and G4’s back camera — with an 8Mpixel IMX268 1/3.2″ camera and a 12mm equivalent, f/2.4 ultra wide angle lens. Again, the ecomony of dual cameras makes far more sense on a phone than trying to build a much more elaborate single camera, particularly given that the thickness of the phone — or really, lack thereof — is still considered a figure of merit.Here’s one you probably didn’t seem coming… the Caterpiller S60. No, I didn’t know CAT made phones either… I did know about the earthmoving gear. Anyway, this phone couples a fairly ordinary 13Mpixel standard camera with a FLIR Lepton thermal imaging camera. Pretty cool… er, pretty hot!Huawei took another shot at the dual camera in 2016 with the P9/P9 Plus. However, this time, they hooked up with Leica! This phone includes two matched 12Mpixel cameras with f/2.2 lenses. Their hook — one of the cameras is monochrome. No Bayer color filter. So it’s collecting about 2–3 times the light of the normal sensor.They also do computational photography, building the depth map from the parallax between the two cameras and delivering a virtual aperture. Again, that’s an image processing “trick”, just as the others discussed. Huawei and Leica have improved this technology to the point that it works very, very well… sometimes. At its best, you get a more-or-less DSLR look (not quality, of course, but the shallow DOF look with simulated bokeh); at worst, you get some funny shots. But for low light, this is a win. It could have been a bigger win, but they introduced a camera with two Sony IMX286 sensors at 1/2.9″ and f/2.2 lenses in a year in which 1/2.6″ and even a few 1/2.3″ sensors ruled and the best cameras had f/2.0-f/1.7 lenses. Sure, small details, but they do add up. This proved a decent enough camera with interesting features, but I think the Leica name had many pundits expecting even more. But hey, the Leica/Huawei hookup is said to be a long-term thing. And also in 2016, Huawei put the same basic setup in the Honor 8.Apple took LG’s dual camera approach the other direction in the iPhone 7 Plus. In addition to the basic wide/normal camera with f/1.8 lens, it included a 2x slight-telephoto lens (equivalent to a 56mm lens on a 35mm camera, it’s really only “tele” in comparison to the wide/normal lense, which is a 28mm equivalent, about where more smartphone “normal” lenses show up) at f/2.8. Both camera chips are 12Mpixel and continue Apple’s tradition of using the smallest camera chips in any premium smartphone, a 1/3″ sensor for the wide/normal camera, a 1/3.6″ sensor for the telephoto. This illustrates the problem with including a telephoto lens in a camera — the lens focal length would also double, making your phone prohibitively thick, if you didn’t shrink the sensor. Apple didn’t do any computational photography at release, but later updated their camera app to include “portrait mode”, which uses camera parallax to build a depth map and gives you artificial depth-of-field effects, intended mainly for portrait shots, as the name suggests.Huawei seems to have settled on their dual-camera approach first introduced in the P9. The relatively new Mate 8 adds a slight twist to this, going to vertical cameras, but also bumping the monochrome camera up to 20MPixel. They are still doing the virtual aperture in their camera app, but other computational photography as well. They’re doing some degree of pixel fusion between the two cameras, merging the color and monochrome to deliver better visual contrast. And they also offer a software zoom/portrait mode, designed to be similar to Apple’s portrait mode. It’s actually possible, based on the decimation of color in JPEG anyway, that a crop of a 20Mpixel monochrome sensor coupled by a cropped 12Mpixel color sensor could deliver something similar to Apple’s zoom-lens 12MPixel sensor. I’d still expect Apple to have the edge, but Huawei certainly could deliver a better image than a straight 12MPixel crop.That’s about it, the bag of trick that have shown up in phones to date… but there’s another one coming. Google has an augmented reality technology called Tango, and phone makers are designing phones specifically to support this. The first one, pictured, is the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, available for pre-order now (see: In 2017, your phone's camera will have superpowers).This phone actually had three back cameras. One is a regular wide/normal angle camera. Next is an infrared camera, which is used as part of the depth mapping of a phone’s view needed for augmented reality. And finally, a dedicated camera for motion tracking. So why the IR camera? Because this phone is doing active scanning, much like the Microsoft Kinect, to build its 3D model, which goes much farther than the sort of photography friendly depth mapping done via parallax cameras.Obviously, this one’s new, and it’ll be up to Google and the developers to make this a compelling feature for other companies.

No. There are no smartphones with an “awesome” low light capability. There are those that are poor, those that are bad, and those that are really bad, at least if you’re comparing them to a decent real camera.The best rated phone camera, this week anyway, is the Google Pixel 2 camera. Both models have the same camera. You can find more ratings on DxO, they’re basically the industry standard for camera image ratings, but their composite rating covers a number of things, so the top rating doesn’t guarantee top low-light performance for certain. See DxOMark. I pretty much do mean “this week” because, until the Galaxy Note 8 and Pixel 2 were tested, the iPhone 8 was the best mobile phone camera DxO had ever tested. And a few new ones have tet to be tested, such as the LG V30 (my V10 had the best rating for a camera in 2015, but today it’s kind of average). Every smartphone maker knows that the camera gets judged, so they’re all getting a little better every year. But they are never going to win out over physics.Photography is about light. In digital photography, your image is the result of photons being collected by photodiodes, freeing electrons to flow, and collecting those up over the course of an exposure. You get noise from two main sources on a smartphone. One is called shot noise — there are so very few photons being collected that you don’t have an even photon flux from pixel to pixel, even in the same light. So you get a dark-area-noise pattern that’s purely random. The other is that, when you collect so few photons, the camera sensor assembly has to amplify the signal (that’s what the ISO setting on your smartphone controls), allowing system noise from the phone to show up as random noise in the image.In order to collect more light, you can either create a wider lens (lower f/number) or a larger sensor. All modern smartphones offer sensors pretty much in-between the size of the two smallest shown here, 1/2.3″ and 1/3.2″. Most seem to use 1/2.6″ or thereabouts, though Apple was still using 1/3″ last I checked.So think about this: with the same aperture lens, a full-frame camera is collecting between and 31x and 56x as much light as a smartphone. Even a Micro Four-thirds camera is collecting between 8x and 14x as much light. And I can slap an f/1.4, f/1.2, or f/0.95 lens on my Micro Four-thirds camera for low-light use.There’s not much they can do. The public has mostly rejected thicker phones, but in order to put in a larger sensor, you’ll need a longer focal-length lens. Today’s smartphone lenses are usually 4–5mm in focal length, fine for a 7–8mm thick phone. Telephoto lenses go to longer focal lengths, and yes, a couple of companies — Apple for example — have put a normal-tele lens on their phones. But they sort of cheated. They went to a 6mm lens, but also shunk down the sensor to 1/3.5″ or so, which effectively increases the magnification. And they’re usually around f/2.5-f/2.8 or slower, since a longer lens has to have a wider opening to deliver the same aperture.The one thing I’ve seen recently that might help is the monochrome camera. Huawei’s P9 and other phones they did with Leica include matched cameras, one color, one monochrome. The Essential Phone also recently adopted this configuration. The win here is from filtering. Those photodiodes that collect light don’t see color, only luminance. So, to make a color sensor, you drop a filter array over the sensor. It’s usually the Bayer Pattern, invented by Bryce Bayer at Kodak:Each filter cuts out about 2/3 of the light entering the sensor. So, if you remove that filter, your sensor can’t see color, only luminance, but it’s not about 3x as sensitive, or 1 and 1/2 f-stops improvement.Tragically, neither the Huawei nor the Essential implementations have proven all that great yet. But this is one area that these companies can go. And given clever software, shooting both color and monochrome together than fusing them as one image will improve the overall shot, particularly in low-light. That’s especially effective because we’re more sensitive to luminance noise than color noise, and so averaging two shots over luminance would reduce about half of the random noise that we find most annoying.It’s also the case that noise in monochrome images is just less bothersome. B&W photos from the classic photography era often used grainy film for higher speeds (I used to shoot Tri-X 400 all the time in High School for indoor photography… back then, yup, ISO400 was about as fast as you’d want to go, though I could push process Tri-X to 1600).