iPhone 15 Pro iPhone 15 Pro Focal lengths white paper ?

[GuillaumeB]

Hello,
I would like to know more about the focal length of the iPhone 15 Pro/Max.
I hear that it's the 28mm and 35mm focals are not just cropped of the standard 24mm and that they have their "special processing pipeline"

if I remember well, in the past Apple used to publish some sort of in-depth articles, like white papers about their technology. However, I can't find one for this. If it just something that has been said on stage ?

 

[lostless]

The iphone 15 pro/promax only has 3 fixed focal length cameras each. They both have a 12Mp 14 mm ultra wide lens, a 48Mp (color is lower resolution, only equivalent 12Mp bayer pattern) 24mm wide lens, and a 12mp 72mm for pro or 120mm for pro max, telephoto lens. For the other “lenses” the 28mm 35mm and 48mm are just cropped images of the 48Mp image of the 24mm lens. So the 48mm “lens” comes out as a true 12Mp picture.
Hope that helps

 

[GuillaumeB]

Thanks for your reply. I actually found an article about this. yes, those digital focal lengths are crops but there is a bit of upscaling going on as well to bump those 12 MP crops to 24 MP

 

[lostless]

The phones do not upscale to 24Mp. Only down, if you don’t have HEIF/Jpeg max turned on. The 26mm , which is a 36Mp crop, and the 35mm, which is a 25Mp crop scale down to 24Mp. Same with the 24mm which is a 48Mp sensor. The 2x 48mm setting always comes out native 12Mp. If you have the max setting turned on, you get the native resolution crop of each setting.
The only upscaling that happens if you zoom between the different presets. So anywhere between .5x and 1x, or 2x and the telephoto, which gives a 12Mp picture, but it’s not native resolution.