LG's patent plans a smartphone of 16 cameras

Move on Huawei, Samsung and Light! LG wants to regain its fame as the first company to offer a dual camera smartphone. The Korean manufacturer has spent a lot of time capitalizing on some of its innovations and it usually seems that it has fallen behind on the train of multiple cameras. A new patent, however, reveals that the company has been actively thinking of ways to change this perception, including putting no less than 16 camera lenses on a single smartphone.

Forget the beauty, this smartphone patent is designed to create beautiful images instead of being beautiful. Imagine sixteen camera lenses arranged in a 4 × 4 matrix, like four Huawei Mate 20 cameras in a grid. Now imagine that you put that in the upper left corner of the back of a smartphone, with a little bend and bulge, so that it actually points in slightly different directions. That's about what LG will ask its future users to put in their pockets.

You may think that LG has gone too far and you will not go wrong. That said, LG has naturally thought about the issue. At least what to apply a patent for that. In a nutshell, these 16 cameras will work together to provide different angles of the same subject. You can choose the best angle or, better yet, create a moving image from the different combined views.

Admittedly, the patent also contains rather strange ideas. It's like choosing a different angle just for a specific head in the picture. Or even replace that head with a different image with similar properties, probably the head of the same person. The network of 4 × 4 cameras even has a mirror, allowing you to take selfies with the big camera. As if taking regular selfies was not already clumsy enough.

Of course, this is a patent, so it's probably not something that will become a reality in the near future. Especially if you consider that it is impossible to go from 5 cameras (on the Nokia 9 PureView) to 16 in such a short time. At least, this shows that LG is taking very, very seriously the competition in the multiple camera market.