As phone users seek more sharpness in selfies and photos, dual-camera smartphones are being lapped up like hotcakes.
Shipments of such phones grew 123% in the first half of this year, showing that camera is increasingly becoming a differentiator for handset makers, according to a report by Cyber Media Research.
While dual-cameras have been around for some time, it is only since last year that smartphone vendors have started making progress on different types of dual-camera implementations to ensure that the photo quality of the primary camera is better than the competition.
"2017 has been the year when dual-camera smartphones became mainstream, primarily pushed by Chinese smartphone vendors cutting across price bands," Prabhu Ram, head-industry intelligence group, CMR, said.
Smartphone vendors have focused on improving pixels and the quality drastically, it said.
On the back of a spate of new launches in Q2, India smartphone market witnessed a 107% rise in dual-camera smartphone shipments ending Q2, CMR said. Q1 was driven primarily by Huawei, Q2 growth can be attributed to the launch of OnePlus 5, the flagship offering from OnePlus with dual-camera shipments now constitute more than 1% of the overall smartphone shipments, the report said.
In the beginning of 2017, Huawei (with its Honor 6X variants), Lenovo Phab 2 plus and the LG G6 and V20 devices made their mark in the Indian smartphone market.
The second quarter of 2017 saw Micromax, ZTE, OnePlus and Gionee, among others, shipping dual-camera smartphones to the Indian market. Clearly, there has been a shift in the smartphone vendor marketing narrative from pixel quality to dual-cameras, he said.
Only two manufacturers, Huawei and LG, had concentrated on dual cameras as early as 2016.
"It is interesting to see how Google with its Google Pixel 2 devices has avoided the dual-camera craze and focused on its single camera. The approach adopted by Oppo with its optical zoom periscope lens could also be the next big step in pushing the envelope forward," Ram said.
The camera has been the centrepiece of action for smartphone vendors for the past many years and in a highly competitive market, with all specs equal, cameras have increasingly emerged as the differentiator for smartphone brands.
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