Let’s make a New Year’s resolution, phone companies. We can do it together. You will stop putting disappointing and/or useless cameras on the back of your phones, and I will stop complaining about them. I’m specifically talking about 8-megapixel wide-angle cameras and 2MP macro/depth cameras, and it’s hardly believable that I’m having to say it as we enter 2025.
It is not the first time I’ve said this This is not the first time manufacturers will be hearing about this, so they can’t feign surprise. At the end of December 2022, I implored device manufacturers to “keep terrible 8MP wide-angle cameras off my phone” in 2023, and at the beginning of 2021, Digital Trends’ contributor Christian de Looper wrote, “phone makers, please stop putting terrible macro cameras in your cheap phones.” Related Yet, here I am at the beginning of 2025, asking the same thing, as the cameras we’ve complained about over the last four years are still making an unwanted appearance. These cameras are bad for different reasons but are likely still used for the same reason — to make midrange phones appear to have more competent cameras than they do. After all, the iPhone has three cameras, so all other phones need three cameras too, regardless of price. Perhaps you need a glimpse of the rogues gallery to understand I’m not exaggerating? The OnePlus 12R, Poco X6 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy M35 all have the dreaded 8MP wide/2MP macro combo, while many of the Motorola G series phones and the Realme GT 6 have an 8MP wide-angle camera, and phones like the Infinix Zero 40 still pad the camera module out with a 2MP depth camera. All these phones were announced in 2024. In fairness, the 8MP wide-angle on the OnePlus Nord 4 wasn’t completely awful, but there’s still only so much the lowly sensor can d