LG is showing a ‘true’ optical zoom lens for mainstream Android phones at CES 2023

Korean electronics conglomerate LG is closing in on showcasing an innovation that has been a long time coming in the field of smartphone cameras — actual optical zoom. At the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023, LG’s smartphone camera division, Innotek, will showcase a folding optical zoom lens that can deliver up to 2.25x optical zoom range. In contrast to how mainstream telephoto smartphone cameras work, Innotek’s solution will actually offer moving lens elements to offer optical zoom in the entire focal range of the lens — and not substitute any part of it with sensor-cropping digital zoom.

To be sure, this is not the very first time that a smartphone telephoto camera is using such technology. Japan’s Sony, which is a key innovator of camera technologies including those for smartphones, unveiled the Xperia 1 IV smartphone in May this year, featuring a true optical zoom lens. However, the latter offered a focal range of 85-125mm — which means that its optical zoom range was only around 1.6x. In other words, you wouldn’t really get a lot of zoom through this camera.

LG Innotek’s folding periscopic optical zoom lens seemingly changes that. According to the company, its lens will offer focal length range of 400-900mm — a range of 2.25x, or more in line with what many smartphone telephoto cameras today offer.

Why is this important? At present, smartphone cameras offer fixed focal length telephoto lenses. While they do offer an optical zoom if you switch directly from the focal length of the wide-angle camera and straight to the telephoto one, any middle part is augmented by digital zoom.

In simple terms, on an Apple iPhone 13, if you switch from 1x zoom to 3x zoom, you are using the optical qualities of your camera. However, any part in the middle — say, a 2.2x zoom — will see the camera algorithm crop into the sensor of the main camera, and thus produce a photograph that is inferior in quality. Having ‘true’ optical zoom with a moving-part lens solves this.

The key challenge is to have precise moving parts in a telephoto lens of such miniaturised size. Innotek is reportedly fixing this challenge with a precise actuator to control the lens’ part movements, thus facilitating optical zoom. Smartphone makers have already reached the benchmark of having 1-inch camera sensors onboard smartphones — which is the minimum benchmark for a camera to be considered worth its salt. With true optical zoom lenses also in the fold, smartphones may finally succeed in entirely replacing fixed-lens compact digital cameras — a segment that, as per market research firm iMarc, could still grow 6% annually until 2027.

LG is partnering with Qualcomm to spread adoption of its true optical zoom lens, in line with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. While no announcements have been made so far, this suggests that flagship smartphones based on the Qualcomm chip, and featuring LG’s optical zoom lens, could be seen at the upcoming CES 2023.