Aaron's website

Smartphone Camera Specs

Smartphone makers and reviewers rarely publish physical focal length and crop factor. To find these specs, try searching for sample galleries and examining the EXIF data with commands like exiftool -FocalLength35efl -DigitalZoomRatio -Megapixels <filename>.

• -FocalLength35efl will give both the physical focal length and the 35mm equivalent, from which you can infer the crop factor.
• -DigitalZoomRatio is checking for digital zoom. We don't want to use sample images with digital zoom since they will affect the reported crop factor. However, Pixel 8 Pro's telephoto camera always seems to report a digital zoom ratio of at least 1.1. And this field isn't always present on different phones.
• -Megapixels might be binned, which undersells the sensor's resolution. Or it might be the full resolution of a sensor using a Quad Beyer filter pattern, which oversells the sensor's color resolution. In any case, if you can figure out how many megapixels should be present in an image with a digital zoom ratio of 1, then you can use the reported megapixel count to check the digital zoom ratio.

It's easy to check -Aperture as well, which you can combine with the crop factor to infer the equivalent f-number. Here's the full command: exiftool -FocalLength35efl -DigitalZoomRatio -Megapixels -Aperture <filename>.

Here's a spreadsheet with stats from some 2024 smartphones. Observations:

• "Telephoto" cameras often have a smaller aperture diameter than main cameras. This limits their usefulness to bright outdoor scenes. This effect is very pronounced on iPhone 15 Pro, and present to a slight extent on S22. That said, iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro have genuinely useful telephoto cameras.
• Pixel 8 Pro's telephoto has a larger aperture diameter and physical focal length than iPhone 15 Pro Max's well-marketed "folding" telephoto.
• For photographing black cats, I love the brightness of main cameras on modern flagship phones. However, the depth of field afforded by these bright fixed-aperture lenses is a bit too shallow for document scanning: The edges of documents are out of focus with S22's equivalent-f/7.7. Document scanning worked great with Pixel 3's equivalent-f/11.
• Also for some landscape scenes, the main and ultrawide cameras on modern flagships may have a bit shallower depth of field than the typically desirable f/8 to f/16 range.