India saw a phenomenal rise in dual-camera smartphone shipment in H1, 2017

NEW DELHI, INDIA: In a highly competitive market, with all specs equal, cameras have increasingly emerged as the differentiator for smartphone brands.

In the last few years, smartphone vendors strived hard to bring superior photography experience to the users, by improved pixels and the image quality drastically. Smartphone with dual-cameras is one among such efforts.

While dual-cameras have been around for some time, it is only since last year that smartphone vendors have started making progress with a focus on different types of dual-camera implementations to ensure that the photo quality of the primary camera is better than the competition.

As per CMR study, there has been a 123% positive growth in shipment of smartphones with dual-cameras in the first half (H1) of 2017, between January and June 2017. On the back of a spate of dual-camera smartphone launches in Q2, the India smartphone market witnessed a 107% rise in dual-camera smartphone shipments ending Q2. In fact, dual-camera shipments now constitute more than 1% of the overall smartphone shipments.

Prabhu Ram, Head – Industry Intelligence Group, CMR said, “2017 has been the year when dual-camera smartphones became mainstream, primarily pushed by Chinese smartphone vendors in the India market cutting across price bands. Q2, 2017 saw Micromax, ZTE, OnePlus and Gionee, among others, shipping dual-camera smartphones to the India market. Clearly, there has been a shift in the smartphone vendor marketing narrative from pixel quality to dual-cameras.”

Only two manufacturers, Huawei and LG took a deep focus on dual-cameras as early as 2016. At the beginning of 2017, the Huawei with its Honor 6X variants, Lenovo Phab 2 plus and the LG G6 and V20 made their mark on the India smartphone market.

While Q1 was driven primarily by Huawei, Q2 growth can be attributed to the launch of OnePlus 5, the flagship offering from OnePlus.

“Looking forward into the future, it is interesting to see how Google with its Google Pixel 2 has avoided the dual-camera craze, and focused on its single camera. The approach adopted by Oppo with its optical zoom periscope lens could also be the next big step in pushing the envelope forward,” added Prabhu Ram.

Going forward, CMR believes that in 2018 and over the short-term, smartphone vendors would move beyond the rat race for better photography and camera specs, and would rather come with new use cases and functions.