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Five iPhone 18 Pro Features Revealed in New Report

cjsuk said:
I suspect variable aperture will be particularly pointless. There's almost no reasonable looking depth of field already and the lenses are currently wide open which should give you shallow DoF. Closing an aperture will only increase DoF and reduce the already limited light. And there's a huge amount of distortion correction which mungs everything outside the centre of the frame already.

tiny sensor + less light = urgh.

Edit: just checked. The quoted base f/1.78 is actually equivalent to f/8 on a normal camera. Which is terrible.

Good comparison - FF camera sensor vs entire iPhone 13 pro camera array....

View attachment 2604552
Click to expand...
Largely agree with your technical assessment but I bet you Apple has a specific feature / use case for this variable aperture that will make it worth it. We just don't know what that is yet. They're not going to launch that hardware feature without showing you something cool it can do.
 
transpo1 said:
Largely agree with your technical assessment but I bet you Apple has a specific feature / use case for this variable aperture that will make it worth it. We just don't know what that is yet. They're not going to launch that hardware feature without showing you something cool it can do.
Click to expand...

They hit the physical limits of the camera architecture already. I doubt very much will come of it.

The 17 Pro I have was a slight regression over the 15 Pro I had before as an example. I think it'll be downhill from here.
 
cjsuk said:
I suspect variable aperture will be particularly pointless. There's almost no reasonable looking depth of field already and the lenses are currently wide open which should give you shallow DoF. Closing an aperture will only increase DoF and reduce the already limited light. And there's a huge amount of distortion correction which mungs everything outside the centre of the frame already.

tiny sensor + less light = urgh.

Edit: just checked. The quoted base f/1.78 is actually equivalent to f/8 on a normal camera. Which is terrible.

Good comparison - FF camera sensor vs entire iPhone 13 pro camera array....

View attachment 2604552
Click to expand...
Yup. It constantly amazes me what high quality pix can be captured with those tiny iPhone Pro lenses.
 
transpo1 said:
Largely agree with your technical assessment but I bet you Apple has a specific feature / use case for this variable aperture that will make it worth it. We just don't know what that is yet. They're not going to launch that hardware feature without showing you something cool it can do.
Click to expand...
Yes, I feel the same way. What value add could variable aperture in such tiny lenses give to still photogs? I suspect that Apple will again surprise me. The constantly increasing camera competence behind those tiny lenses continually amazes me.

The camera software has been flaky for me lately, but I hope that is just a temporary bug.
 
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cjsuk said:
They hit the physical limits of the camera architecture already. I doubt very much will come of it.

The 17 Pro I have was a slight regression over the 15 Pro I had before as an example. I think it'll be downhill from here.
Click to expand...
Oh, there’s lots of room for iPhone cameras to grow. For starters they can simply match some of the very cool features found on Chinese companies’ phones. In the future, they should make the sensors/lenses on the Pro bigger. At this point, we’re basically buying Point & Shoot cameras with smartphone features— let’s just go all the way 🤣
 
transpo1 said:
Oh, there’s lots of room for iPhone cameras to grow. For starters they can simply match some of the very cool features found on Chinese companies’ phones. In the future, they should make the sensors/lenses on the Pro bigger. At this point, we’re basically buying Point & Shoot cameras with smartphone features— let’s just go all the way 🤣
Click to expand...

Not really.

If you make the sensor bigger you increase the incident angle of light on the sensor. That means you then have a problem designing angle calibrated microlenses on the die for the primary lens. Which leads to chromatic aberration and coloured vignetting which can't be corrected in software. The only way you can deal with that is decrease the incident angle of light on the sensor which means changing the lens design to reduce the incident angle. Ultimately the lens has to be much much larger. Either way what lands on the sensor is not what you see in a smartphone.

So you get this far and you get a wonky ass image read off the sensor that looks something like the following and post processed into oblivion to make it look like a reasonable image
7t1emcgszpk11.jpg


The problem is the post processing steps literally damage the image which is what people are complaining about in the 17 series camera issues threads. There's too many hacks already. As for the Chinese phones, they are pretty awful as well. The AI zoom stuff they have now is even worse - it's just making up **** 😂

I implore people to look at some of the images on something larger than a smartphone. They're horrible.

We should go back to 12MP (larger pixels) and give us another 4mm deep phone if we want a camera in a phone.
 
What a snooze fest “innovation” has become under Cook without Jobs/Ive. Soulless uninspired money pit. Sh*t colors too.
 
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