Should a second iPhone Air 2 camera be telephoto or ultrawide? [Poll]

There’s been a whole flurry of rumors about a 2nd-gen iPhone Air lately. It’s getting a second camera; it’s been delayed to allow time to add this; it’s been indefinitely delayed due to the original model proving unpopular; it probably won’t be getting a second camera but will be getting an updated chip.

Whenever there are this many conflicting reports, the smart money is on nobody outside Apple really knowing what’s going on. But if the second camera report is true, that leaves another question to be answered …

Which second camera?

The reports have suggested it would be the ultrawide, but a number of commenters have suggested that a telephoto lens would be more useful.

Some have been using Smart Albums in the Mac Photos app to check the number of photos they have taken with each of the lenses. The way that Apple breaks the smart folders down by iPhone makes this a somewhat tedious process for anyone who upgrades their iPhone every year or nearly every year, but a random sampling of my own photos suggests that I use the main lens most of the time and the ultrawide and telephoto roughly equally – which doesn’t help much in choosing between the two!

You would usually use the telephoto lens when photographing people, but I also found that I use it for both cityscapes and landscapes. For example, here’s a sampling of photos taken with a telephoto lens:

And here are some taken with the iPhone ultrawide or equivalent:

Personally, I would be loath to lose either capability – but there is one argument in favour of a second camera being an ultra-wide, not a telephoto lens. You can always emulate a telephoto lens by using the main camera and then digitally cropping, but there is no way* of getting a wider field of view.

*Technically you could convert the main lens to either telephoto or ultrawide by using a third-party accessory, but the whole point of the iPhone Air is that it is super-sleek, so most users are unlikely to want to do this.

Yes, digital zoom loses the compression effect of a telephoto lens, though this is limited when using the iPhone anyway. And yes, there does come a point when digital cropping eats into quality. However, the vast majority of iPhone photos are only ever viewed on an iPhone, iPad, or digital photo frame, and have sufficient resolution to allow you to crop in significantly without impacting quality. So if I had to choose between the two, I would favor the ultrawide over the telephoto.

What about you? Please take our poll and share your thoughts in the comments.