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.”
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 do.
It needs guts
The trouble is, you only need to read the specification sheet to know that only one camera — the main camera — is worth your time on any of these phones. The 8MP/2MP cameras aren’t there to improve the camera but to make the camera module look like [insert your preferred flagship phone here]. This is usually reflected in our reviews, too, where the 2MP macro or depth cameras aren’t really worth talking about at all, and the 8MP wide-angle camera is just met with disappointment.
It takes guts to release a phone with fewer than three cameras on the back these days, and only a few manufacturers have had the stones to do it over the last few years, and even fewer that make the most out of a pair of cameras. Despite so many phones with substandard wide-angle cameras, you may not have had the dubious pleasure of using one, so you haven’t seen how bad it gets.
To show where we’re being short-changed with an 8MP wide-angle and how it can quite easily be avoided, I took the 2024 Redmi 13 Pro Plus — which has both an 8MP wide-angle and a 2MP macro camera, and a candidate for the worst camera of the year — out with the 2023 Nothing Phone 2, which has a 50MP main and a 50MP wide-angle camera, to illustrate our point. Both cost around the same when they were released and represent decent midrange buys, meaning it’s a fair comparison outside of each brand’s choice of wide-angle camera.
This is how bad 8MP wide-angle cameras are
The first example, taken inside in favorable lighting, may not immediately reveal where the 8MP wide-angle fails, and at first glance, it’s not that bad. However, the Nothing Phone 2’s camera balanced the colors and exposure more effectively, and you can see how noisy the car’s bodywork is when you take a moment to examine it more closely. But the real problems are seen when you crop the image.
You don’t need to be an expert to see the differences. From the sharper, color-accurate GTechniq sign to the additional detail on the roof of the house in the distance, the Nothing Phone 2’s wide-angle camera takes dramatically sharper and clearer photos, and that’s without mentioning the obscene level of noise in the Redmi’s wide-angle photo. This isn’t a problem specific to the Redmi phone, though; it’s what we see in every 8MP wide-angle camera photo.
Take the cameras outside, and things don’t improve for the 8MP wide-angle camera. The same problems seen indoors with the 8MP wide-angle camera exist again, with noise ruining the clear blue sky, noticeable edge enhancement trying to sharpen the church’s spire, and fuzziness obscuring detail on the stonework.
Crop the image down, and all these things are very obvious, and there’s crucial evidence of the differences in the pixel count, too. The Nothing Phone 2’s 50MP photos are 4080 x 3072 pixels and are, on average, about 6MB files, while the Redmi’s 8MP photos are 3264 x 2448 pixels, and the files rarely crack 3MB in size. Simply, 8MP wide-angle cameras weren’t good enough in 2023 and border on the unacceptable in 2025.
Does it matter?
If there’s a camera on the back of my phone, I assume it’s there to be used. When I take a photo with it, I then expect it to be of good enough quality that I’m encouraged to use it again and to look back at the photos in the future and find them pleasing. An 8MP wide-angle camera doesn’t meet that standard, and the Nothing Phone 2 proves manufacturers can include a wide-angle camera that does without dramatically increasing the final cost of the phone.
For 2025, I’d like to see more manufacturers copy Nothing instead of fobbing us off with rubbish wide-angle cameras in an effort to fool buyers into thinking the device has a high-quality triple-camera setup. Put a wide-angle camera on the back of the phone by all means; I like using them, but make it a good one and forget the 2MP macro cameras completely. If there’s a 2MP depth camera and it really does make a difference to portrait shots, just leave it off the spec sheet, as it’s not actually a camera people will use.
Unfortunately, 2025 has started off really badly. The very first phone to be announced this year, the Honor Magic 7 Lite, doesn’t have an 8MP wide-angle or a 2MP depth camera and instead puts a 5MP wide-angle next to the 108MP main camera. That’s right — the 8MP wide-angle isn’t cheap or terrible enough anymore; we are apparently going to get 5MP wide-angle cameras cluttering up the back of our phones.
Some of the manufacturers that should know better, such as OnePlus, Poco, and Redmi, are preparing to release replacements for some of the phones mentioned above. Here’s hoping they redeem themselves with decent wide-angle cameras, and if they don’t, they should hang their heads in shame. It’s not like this will be the first time they’ve heard complaints. We’ve said it for years.
