The band where your lens sees wider than the phone
When your lens and mode see wider than the phone's widest camera, Viewfinder still draws the whole frame and fills the part the phone cannot see with a plain band. The capsule under the top strip reads "Beyond this phone · frame is a guide".
The frame lines show the full field of view of the lens on the mode you picked. Inside them, the live picture covers only what the phone can see; the rest is the band. It is there so a wide lens on a large sensor is never quietly cropped to what the phone can reach.
The band is in your stills and takes too, so a shot from a very wide setup still shows how much more the real lens takes in.
Change the band's color
- Open Settings and go to Frame lines.
- Under Beyond-hardware fill, pick Purple (the default), Charcoal or Black.
The same row is in Overlays, under Appearance.
Fill the band
- Clip a wide converter over the phone's camera and set its factor under Phone Attachment in Setup (0.45×, 0.5×, 0.6×, 0.75× or a custom factor). The phone then sees wider, and the band shrinks or goes.
- On an iPad, the band shows up more often, because most iPads have no ultra wide camera. The capsule says "Beyond this iPad" there.
The same capsule also appears when the phone will not zoom as far as a long lens needs. The frame lines are still where the lens would put them; the picture behind them is not the real field of view, so treat the frame as a guide there too.
If that didn't work
If the band appears on a lens that should fit, check the recording mode in Setup: an open gate mode sees wider than a 16:9 crop. To see how sensor size and focal length set the angle, try the field of view calculator and the crop factor calculator.
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Updated November 2, 2026