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Image: Freepik
You might not have noticed if you’re the type to upgrade your smartphone frequently, but the main cameras that they use have been getting wider and wider in their field of view throughout the years. While phones are now indisputably the most popular cameras in the world, most manufacturers have settled on a type of lens that used to be considered quite exotic and challenging to use in the camera space.
The main camera on the iPhone 17 Pro, for example, has the same field of view as a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera, which is the general photographic standard for measuring focal lengths. This is a perspective that few companies would have considered using on a point-and-shoot camera in the past—it’s compositionally awkward for a non-zooming lens. Nonetheless, it is clearly now a new standard of its own.
But what if there’s another way? Recently, I’ve been using the Z80 Ultra from Nubia, a relatively niche consumer brand owned by the Chinese telecoms giant ZTE. Nubia’s core philosophy around smartphone cameras is that we’ve gone way too far out with 24mm lenses—instead, there’s a lot to be gained by bringing things back to 35mm.
For much of photographic history, the 24mm-ish lenses we’re all so used to now were considered pretty wide. Fabled German camera maker Leica, for example, didn’t start designing 24mm lenses until the ‘90s; its classic focal lengths throughout much of the 20th century were 50mm, 35mm, 28mm, and 21mm. Anything wider than 24mm was typically referred to as ultrawide, while 35mm was at the longest end of the “wide-angle” spectrum.
And 35mm lenses on smartphones aren’t new—in fact, most devices in the early days used that kind of lens. This held for every iPhone all the way through to the iPhone 5S in 2013, which came in slightly longer than 28mm-equivalent. By the time of the iPhone XS in 2018, the field of view had widened to around 26mm, and 2022’s iPhone 14 Pro went wider still, to about 28mm.
Why the shift? One obvious advantage to a wider lens is that you can simply fit more stuff in the shot. The 28mm focal length is easier to use than 35mm for shooting groups of people, for example. The field of view also tends to be easier to design physically shorter lenses for, which was critical as phones started to get thinner. And if you want a 35mm-equivalent field of view, you can always crop in from the wider focal length; Apple has been actively promoting this as a built-in feature in recent years with 1.2x (28mm) and 1.5x (35mm) options in the iPhone camera app.
But you do lose the qualities of a native 35mm-equivalent lens when you do this. Cropping your image will always compromise on quality to some extent, and you don’t get the same compressed perspective that comes from a longer focal length. 35mm is a natural perspective that offers more subject isolation with blurrier backgrounds than if you were using a 28mm-equivalent lens on the same sensor. There’s a reason Fujifilm opted for 35mm on its ultra-popular X100 line of enthusiast compact cameras.
While I wouldn’t say the Nubia Z80 Ultra has the world’s greatest camera system—its image processing leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the likes of Oppo and Xiaomi—the shooting experience is good enough to convince me that 35mm is a worthy route to pursue. Coupled with a genuinely useful two-stage shutter button, the 35mm lens on the Z80 Ultra just feels more like a real camera than most other phones.
Of course, sometimes you will want a wider perspective. Nubia’s answer to that is simply to provide an 18mm-equivalent ultrawide camera that’s capable enough for you to crop into 24mm and get passable results. Even the highest-end phones have been compromising on ultrawide camera hardware in recent years, but the Z80 Ultra’s ultrawide has a relatively huge 1/1.56” inch sensor—that’s as big as the main camera on many upper midrange phones. The 24mm results aren’t going to blow you away, but they’re more than serviceable.
Camera design is always about trade-offs, so it’s refreshing to see a phone that makes different choices; the 35mm main lens on the Z80 Ultra is just one of them. Nubia also opted for an almost-invisible under-display selfie camera, for example, which gives you a genuinely full-screen image when watching video—at the expense of, well, selfie quality.
While the execution isn’t fully there just yet, I really think Nubia is onto something with this 35mm design. Coupled with a strong 18mm ultrawide, a solid 70mm telephoto, and a real shutter button, the Z80 Ultra presents a photographer-forward system that feels meaningfully different to other phone cameras.
When it comes to photography, what’s not in the frame is just as important as what is. Smartphone cameras have come to dominate the world, so it’s worth considering the trade-offs when it comes to their wider perspective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Byford is a journalist who writes for the tech site Multicore from Tokyo. Multicore focuses on the intersection of technology hardware, design and photography.
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