New Delhi, Nov 1 (IANS): As smartphone vendors focus on improving image quality, the first half of 2017 saw 123 per cent growth in shipment of devices with dual-camera system, new research said on Wednesday.

At the beginning of 2017, Huawei (with its Honor 6X variants) Lenovo Phab 2 plus and the LG G6 and V20 devices made their mark in the Indian smartphone market.

"2017 has been the year when dual-camera smartphones became mainstream, primarily pushed by Chinese smartphone vendors cutting across price bands," Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group, CyberMedia Research (CMR), said in a statement.

"The second quarter of 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," Ram added.

Only two manufacturers, Huawei and LG, took a deep focus on Dual-cameras as early as 2016.

"On the back of a spate of dual-camera smartphone launches in Q2, India smartphone market witnessed a 107 per cent rise in sual-camera smartphone shipments ending Q2," the research said.

While Q1 was driven primarily by Huawei, Q2 growth can be attributed to the launch of OnePlus 5, the flagship offering from OnePlus with dual-camera shipments now constitute more than one per cent of the overall smartphone shipments.

"It is interesting to see how Google with its Google Pixel 2 devices 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 Ram.

According to CMR, in 2018 and over the short-term, smartphone vendors would move beyond the rat race for better photography and camera specs and would come up with new use cases and functions.