Phone 18 to feature variable aperture camera and "huge" increase in battery life

Citysnaps said:
That would be huge if it's a true variable aperture, and permits throwing backgrounds out of focus (similar to the attached photo). Right now I'm skeptical.
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That’s the whole point of aperture control, depth of field. 🙂 Not saying this is what Apple will create.
 
One thing people have been (rightly) complaining about is the minimum focus distance of the main camera, which has been slowly increasing over the years and is now uncomfortably far on the latest iPhones. I wonder if one benefit of the variable aperture is that you can effectively make the usable minimum focus distance a bit shorter by stopping down the aperture. This usually wouldn't work (on a DSLR lens), but with a very short real focal length (as in iPhones), it just might.

Other than that, can't really think of many uses for a variable aperture on a phone. Depth of field is already quite wide, light sensitivity can be controlled via ISO, and diffraction is going to be painful with such a small sensor. So this would seem like a modest improvement to the camera, unless I'm missing some other uses for this...

Cmaier said:
It could, but unless the variable aperture is such that the widest-open it gets is much *more* than what the current effective aperture is, it won’t blur anything. For example, the current telephoto lens has a 35-mm equivalent fixed aperture of something like f8.0. With a real full-frame camera, you aren’t going to get any background blur at f8.0. You’d want something like f2.8 or f2.0, at a maximum.
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IIRC the aperture number is real (only the focal lengths are given as a 35mm-equivalent), as it's basically a measure of photons / unit area and it's directly comparable with f numbers of DSLR lenses. It's just that a f/1.4 aperture gives a *very* different depth of field in a 4mm lens (with massive crop) vs a 50mm or 200mm lens. So even if you have a relatively huge aperture size (for the lens' size), you still get little depth of field. There really is no way around having longer focal lengths (which require a larger sensor...) in order to get shallower depth of field.
 
Andropov said:
IIRC the aperture number is real (only the focal lengths are given as a 35mm-equivalent), as it's basically a measure of photons / unit area and it's directly comparable with f numbers of DSLR lenses. It's just that a f/1.4 aperture gives a *very* different depth of field in a 4mm lens (with massive crop) vs a 50mm or 200mm lens. So even if you have a relatively huge aperture size (for the lens' size), you still get little depth of field. There really is no way around having longer focal lengths (which require a larger sensor...) in order to get shallower depth of field.
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The aperture number may be real, but I convert everything to 35mm equivalents otherwise nobody has any intuition as to what the numbers mean. As such, I believe the math is that if you had a lens with around 7mm aperture on the telephoto sensor, you’d get a depth of field approximate to 2.8 on a 35mm sensor. (I am doing. a lot of estimating as to sizes of things, though). It still wouldn’t look like it came from a 35mm sensor, of course, because of the size of the pixels and the poor quality of the lens; compare a Leica summicron-35 to a $100 35mm f2.0 chinese lens and you’ll see very different bokeh. You aren’t going to match even the chinese lens with a small chunk of folded polycarbonate.
 
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