The Vergecast · Thursday, October 1, 2026
A caller proposed that smartphone companies could leverage existing internal components like sensors and ISPs to create affordable digital cameras. However, the hosts explained that manufacturing high-quality glass and lenses, along with the logistical challenges of creating new product lines, makes this proposition difficult.
“Like, why can't a smartphone company just throw together a digital camera using off-the-shelf smartphone parts where they have all the sensors, they have the ISPs, they can clear these source screens? They would just need to find glass, right? That's the only thing that they would really need.”
“So what's stopping Motorola from just taking a mid-range Android phone and slapping an actual piece of glass in front of it and dropping a little digicam for like $400.”
“Smartphone companies want to do instead is just make the smartphone as good of a camera as possible. So you've seen Vivo, you've seen Oppo, you've seen all these companies literally making attachments, these like lens attachments that they slap onto the phone. And I think that that is where the experimental side of the frontier is happening right now.”
“Glass is hard to make for multiple reasons. Both. It's very hard to make it pure. It's very hard to make it clean and have a big aperture and all these things. That's a whole industry in itself.”