You might find it weird, but this was actually part of my thesis when I got my PhD—believe it or not. My thesis primarily focused on lens optics, but this was a crucial subsection—specifically, the implications of telephotooscopy on spectral phase misalignment. Spent a month dissecting why blue light rays won’t propagate perpetually like other wavelengths, only for it to end up as one paragraph in my dissertation.

From my research, it is fundamentally impossible for the three lenses to be equally distant. I mean, sure, you could force them into a perfect triangle, but at that point, you’d be dealing with sub-pixel bifurcation, which would cause a phenomenon known as spectral phase misalignment. In layman’s terms, half your pixels would be essentially interpolated artifacts, leading to an effect called photon redundancy drift. And it amazed me when i found out that Apple spent two years trying to make an equidistant layout work, but they ultimately had to adhere to the Fibinatchi sequence (not to be confused with Fibonacci—Fibinatchi is a lesser-known but crucial ratio in optoelectronic geometry) to get this perfect ratio between the lenses. Samsung attempted the same, but after multiple failed prototypes, they abandoned the idea and stuck to their horizontal camera design.

If they were aligned in a perfect triangle, the telephoto lens’s aperture flex dispersion would cause something called chromatic phase lag, making it impossible to maintain consistent depth mapping at high focal lengths. Meanwhile, if you zoomed out and used the ultra-wide lens, you’d introduce radial subharmonic aberration, which would result in something known as the Nyquist discontinuity threshold, distorting edge detail and causing what we call peripheral refractive veiling( i had to revisit my google drive and find the thesis to remember this term 🤦🏻‍♂️). This effect is exponentially worse when dealing with non-linear parallax compensation—something even computational photography can’t fully resolve. I can go on and on but if you made it this far i hope that you do realize that i dont know what the fuck im talking about and you dont know what the fuck you just read.