iPhone 15 Pro Max iPhone 15 Pro Max optical lens (how can it have 4 optical zoom ranges when only 3 lens?)

[msackey]

According to Apple's tech specs, iPhone 15 Pro Max has the following optical zoom/telephoto lens: 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 5x. However, there are only 3 lenses on the back. So how does the phone get the 4th optical telephoto?

 

[StumpyBloke]

It crops the 2x.

 

[msackey]

It crops the 2x.

Hmm. I'm dense. So does this mean it's cropping from the 1x photo to get the 2x output?

If so, how is that effectively different from me manually cropping my 1x photo to get the 2x output?

 

[StumpyBloke]

Yes it is cropping the 48 megapixel sensor photograph.

And no different from what you could do as far as I can see.