Zooming doesn’t correct the perspective though.

I didn’t know they blended lenses to create a 50mm, there must be some post processing tricks to have it look right - are there examples side by side with a true 50mm?

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding here and a lot of optically correct comments are being down voted.

50mm is a focal length. If what you like about 50mm is indeed the perspective (as opposed to other subtle things that may creep like aperture/bike or aberration or vignetting of the specific lens) then zooming something to 50mm effective field of view is exactly what will accomplish the goal.

Perspective is determined entirely by the position of the photographer relative to the subject. There will be no difference in perspective if you zoom in with the phone to get the same angle of view you get with a 50mm lens on a full frame camera.

Here is one of many explanations of this you can find online: https://www.photoreview.com.au/tips/shooting/perspective-and....

From the article:

> Changing the lens focal length without changing the camera position has no impact upon the perspective in the scene, even though it radically alters the size of objects within the scene

Radically altering the size of objects within the scene is what most average people mean by perspective. It’s exactly the effect the author of the article is claiming doesn’t happen yet he proved it does immediately.

Is that technically the correct usage of the term perspective? Yes! It’s just not the specific technical usage definition common in optics. But it is correct, as it’s referencing the relative size & position of objects.

The point is that it doesn't do anything that you couldn't achieve by cropping a photo taken with a wider lens from the same position. The relative size and position of the objects doesn't change.

It does. Focal length is just an alternate notation for FOV. 2x crop on a “28mm” photo should geometrically match that of any 1,2/55, except bluriness(bokeh) effect and image quality.