Help me understand this. When you look at the photos an iPhone can take with its tiny set of lenses, why do our DSLR lenses need to be so big? I get the flange needs to be large enough to cover the sensor. Seems a bit overkill unless I'm missing something.
I mean the simple answer is that the photos an iPhone takes with its tiny lenses is nowhere near as good (although the clever software trickery gets them somewhere close in a lot of situations).
I remember watching an interesting video about this a while back that pointed out that lenses that get the same results are usually roughly the same size regardless of the sensor size. So an APS-C f2.8 zoom will be about the same size as the full frame f4 zoom, but the results from both lenses will be pretty similar. For example, the Fujifilm 16-55 f2.8 is actually bigger and heavier than the Zeiss 24-70 f4, even though it's APS-C. Similarly Panasonic did a constant f1.7 zoom for the micro four-thirds system, and it's a monster, looking like a full frame lens even though it's got a bit of a reduced zoom range of 10-25mm (20-50mm full frame equivalent).
In very rough terms, the diameter of the glass bits need to be big enough to cover the diagonal size of the sensor. Surrounding the glass bits is the electronics for focussing and zooming, and surrounding this is the metal or plastic casing
Again in very rough terms, the front-to-back size of the lens is the focal length of the lens ... so for the average dSLR a 200mm lens for example needs to be somewhere about 200mm long
Phone-cameras are only about 5mm thick, and the phone-camera designers have some very smart tricks using mirrors or prisms to bend the image across the body of the phone to create greater magnification. The -but- is that the sensor must be very small to fit inside the phone, therefore the pixels are truely microscopic in size, and while the image looks beaut on the phone or tablet, if one was to print a phone image to say, 8" x 12" or larger, its sharpness and overall quality is questionable.
I have done a small experiment comparing the lens sharpness of my $99 - 3x zoom Olympus slip-in-the-pocket camera with my smart-fone camera (and I'd better not mention names here~ it will start a war of words) !!
Here is the original scene ... note the flag on the back of the boat
Here is the comparison between the $99 camera and the smart fone camera
I have done a small experiment comparing the lens sharpness of my $99 - 3x zoom Olympus slip-in-the-pocket camera with my smart-fone camera (and I'd better not mention names here~ it will start a war of words) !!
Here is the original scene ... note the flag on the back of the boat
Here is the comparison between the $99 camera and the smart fone camera
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dude, killer write up! 
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