Dual-camera setups for phones are not new at all, yet only Apple gets the props for "changing the camera industry" .. For the other vendors it's a "gimmick" !
So, it's hilarious to me that today the number one statistic quoted by Apple fans is about how much money Apple makes or how many units they've sold.
It's almost as if many of the people who lived in the 90's are still alive today, including the Apple fans. I personally have many friends who were Apple fans then and now.
It also applied to original iphone.
But now, other phones are on par regarding quality and accessibility with iphone and they've had this feature for long. Your comparison simply doesn't apply.
Apple, at this point, is only a marketing gimmick.
Unfortunately after several years of using Android phones, I got an iphone (6s) this year. It's simply a bad phone. I'm getting a new Android device this week.
So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean, I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.
How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?
It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference.
iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs.
Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.
I do get upset at google though -- i wish they did more to make it easier for developers to port their apps to android. also the iOS version of apps are built better, it sucks to have a garbage version of snapchat on android. but the sacrifice is worth it to have the physical back button.
"The launch of the initial iPhone may have harmed mobile camera tech development. There was a rush was to put touch screens on everything and cameras seemed to be less important all of a sudden when busting out a top-end spec list."
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...
Look at HTC. They tried and failed. Dual camera, but the Bokeh is actually a gimmick. It doesn't work.
http://petapixel.com/2016/09/07/iphone-7-7-plus-announced-du... (Scroll about halfway down.)
The fake Bokeh from the dual cameras looks like flat circles with Gaussian blur applied. It's a useless gimmick, I can't imagine ruining real photos with this look.
Also my understanding is that there's no blending of images between the two cameras at all. You literally use only one camera or the other. There are existing systems on the market that do this correctly to obtain a much higher quality of image than what is possible with only one camera alone. I would expect Apple to implement this in a future software update.
The way depth information is determined with phase detection autofocus is very similar conceptually with how you'd generate a depth map in software from two separate cameras.
Granted, not all cameras can do phase detection AF at f/8, and at 35mm you have enough DOF that the accuracy of the AF is not that critical. But they can do AF at f/5.6 accurate enough for a 50mm lens. That gives you 8.92mm separation. Still comparable to iPhone.
The microlens/aperture system of the AF masks essentially the back plane of the lens (which follows from the exit pupil) for the AF sensor (interacting mainly with the exit telecentrism of the lens, which is why AF speed and acccuracy can widely vary with lens type, even if the same f-stop is used). Also a reason (besides the fact that many digital sensor designs perform better with telecentric designs due to increased scattering and reflections in the sensor itself compared to film) why modern lenses are almost always strongly telecentric designs.
A completely separate matter is the circle of confusion which is indeed directly related to the aperture of the lens.
(I hope I got most of the optical terms correct, I don't normally discuss this topic in English)
You can trivialy make a great bokeh implementation that's not merely a Gaussian blur.
And I don't see much horrible in these examples -- perfectly fine I'd rather say, if a little overemphasized. But you can get totally blurry bokeh from some lenses, including smeared highlights instead of nice little circles...
Since it's done in software, Apple could use a more uniform circle kernel instead of a Gaussian kernel to do a more authentic bokeh style.
But, it is Apple, so I'm sure people will buy them. Missing 3.5mm jack and all...
It's not even out yet! How do you if its any better?