Zoom on selfie camera on (3a)

Lio

Why can’t you zoom while using the selfie camera? I realise that it’s limited to how small you can get a small front camera at this price point, but correct me if I’m wrong, digital zoom is just zooming in on an image. Why would you have to take a photo, zoom in on the photo and take a screenshot when you should just be able to zoom in when taking the photo? What don’t I know?

Womey

Lio

You can zoom to 1.2x

Banjer

Move your hand closer…

Lio

Banjer a

Alright class, what happens if you move something too close to a camera? That’s right, it doesn’t focus and the image comes out blurry.

Lio

Womey

Gosh, I didn’t know that. You can’t zoom out (which is understandable, the front camera isn’t an ultra-wide camera), but you can’t zoom in any further than that. I don’t want to come across as rude in my replies, so I apologise for that, but my point still stands. Has no one else ever been annoyed you can’t zoom in on the selfie camera? Only me?

Banjer

Probably because most people have no need to zoom in on selfies, i can get close enough to fill the screen with my face without it losing focus. And like you said, if I really needed a picture of a detail on my face I’d just take a selfie and crop the image (no need to take a screenshot, just use the cropping feature in the editor)

Lio

Banjer

True. But am I wrong to think it would be really easy for Nothing to let us zoom? I understand that most people don’t want to zoom on selfies, I just think, why not? Why is it NOT an option?

Banjer

Any added functionality leeds to extra code and complexity, and that can allow for more bugs, so I guess they carefully weigh the usefulness of extra functions versus adding to the code and complexity.

Lio

Banjer

I suppose that is true, good point. It isn’t exactly Nothing’s top priority.

Anonymous931

Also an excellent point. I can tell you’ve done your research. I suppose I may have underestimated how challenging these things can be, even if it’s a minor detail.

Anonymous931

You can’t zoom because there is no autofocus and that’s a hardware limitation. With autofocus as you zoom in all focus adjustments are made automatically in order to keep sharpness of the subject (so, your face). As depth of field changes (when zooming in) everything becomes blurry when there is no autofocus (or even better - PDAF). Software workaround with digital zoom (so you zoom in then image gets cropped) is probably possible, but that’s still questionable because smoothness/lack of sharpness would almost certainly still be present because of, well, no autofocus.