Phones with Second Telephoto (3x)

Phone zoom is three different things and they are easy to confuse: optical zoom magnifies with the lens itself and loses no detail; sensor-crop zoom magnifies by cropping into the middle of a high-resolution sensor and stays clean up to a point; digital zoom enlarges the image and fills the pixels in between by computation.

Carrying two separate telephoto lenses closes the gap in the zoom range: with a single 5x telephoto, the 2x and 3x framings are produced by digital cropping, while a second, shorter telephoto makes that range optical too. Because portrait distance (around 3x) is one of the most used ranges, the difference is felt in everyday shooting.