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As I understand Apple does use a periscope lens. They just decided to call it ""tetraprism lens" in line with their tradition to use weird proprietary terminology (super liquid retina anyone?) to pretend that they use some unique technology when in fact they use what everyone else uses (just with a lag).
Weird for dummies only. "Tetra" means four. Four bends in a light path to make it physically shorter.
 
I don’t know how the ‘2x’ behaves on 14Pro, especially if RAW — on cameras like the Leica Q which encourage cropping as they have one fixed lens — they capture the whole sensor output and simply apply a crop to the .DNG which you can change or recrop later.

This feels similar, otherwise yes it’s a downsampling of the 1x camera to a 12MP output. Coming from the 13 mini where I shoot 1x a lot, this feels kinda exciting or useful.
 
The degradation is still evident. It certainly does not work as well as on TV crime shows, where some technician hits an "Enhance" button and a blur of pixels resolves into a license plate--or a portrait quality photo of the actor playing the crook. :)
It’s evident, certainly. Still, much better than the digital zoom of yore.
 
The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max should't have different specs besides size and battery life! I don't want a bigger phone for the best features!

Agreed. It’s worse when you know they‘ll magically be able to fit this into next years 16 Pro (not Max).
 
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It’s 125mm full frame, which is basically the end of the portraiture focal lengths. Going beyond that photos of people start to get unflattering. Once you get past 200 you’re talking about sports and wildlife, neither of which a phone is useful for. And it’ll come at a massive cost to image quality.

Big zoom multipliers are for spec sheet comparisons, in the real world they’re not that useful and will come at a cost on every photo you take.
Yeah at that point wider (full frame) with lots of pixels + crop makes more sense.

RAW photos with the 14 pro (cropped) looked better than some periscope shots from phone cameras with further zoom when pixel peeping was applied to finished photos.
Oh yeah it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. Why should I believe the actual engineers when they say they needed the room of the bigger model when some rando on a web forum said they shoulda been able to do what he wanted? lol you dudes crack me up.

But like the original OIS feature which was a Plus exclusive, eventually they’ll get the miniaturization down and we’ll see it elsewhere. But this requires time and work. Always have a chuckle when non-engineers tell me things should be easy for us. Or when people fail to realize we improve techniques over time and that’s why things get better, smaller, faster.
Fair points, though delivery could have been far less crass.

Yeah I am no expert in this regard, however I am not exactly sure what the engineers have said outside of the keynote. Do you have a link you can share on the subject? Be curious to see the teardowns on these devices to see / compare the full camera modules between the Pro and Max.

As a casual viewer, agreed, my observations are in no way expert. I do understand (from other phone manufacturers) the size of periscope modules in Android phones, and that Apple went a different direction to refract light. What Apple is doing is Brilliant, they found a great solution that doesn't direct light down the phone or nessicarially require a taller device. What is (clearly) uncertain is why they couldn't bring it down to the (not much) smaller phone.

Regarding the iPhone, All things aside, why does the regular 15 pro need to be millimetriclly thin or narrow? They have made phones thicker to cram in more features in the past, a few MM either direction likely would have had some detractors, but maintaining feature parity between "pro" models likely would have earned more fans.

Just my opinion, still going to be happy with my upgrade, even if I don't get the extra bump in Zoom the Max models receive.

Cheers.
 
Optical zoom is still subpar because of the lower telephoto specs, I've trained myself to just crop via software. The loss of quality really shows with fast moving subjects. 5x optical is still nice for those pictures when you don't care so much about quality, and certainly a million times nicer than digital zoom.
 
my camcorder had 100x digital zoom. I'm not impressed.

Samsung and other phones with the extreme digital zoom just uses Ai to make up the picture. Optical is WAY better!

Samsung has 10x optical. Apple 5x
Honestly I was hoping for 10x optical zoom across both Pro’s or at least 5x optical on the Pro and 10x optical on the Max.

Huge opportunity missed unfortunately. Seems more R&D went o the action button, titanium 5 alloy, ANC during calls on iPhone itself before optical zoom.
 
It’s pretty cool what is inside the iPhone 15 Pro models! Wow!

View attachment 2259997

It’s a great alternative to a typical Periscope camera setup … but I think it’s telling that Apple has reached their finite limit of space in the iPhone camera arrangement.

Kudo’s to Apple adding in Macro pictures that are clear without needing to add another camera. I was saying how crazy 4+ camera’s are getting on phones today. Ideally with periscope hood glass lens and this tech should be reduced down to 2!

Still I was hoping for 10x optical zoom for both and at least 5x/10x Pro/Max. Alas that’ll be next year.

I fully expect a major camera redesign next year. It’s telling Apple has reached their finite space in the iPhone models in the Pro and Pro Max.
 
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It’s a great alternative to a typical Periscope camera setup … but I think it’s telling that Apple has reached their finite limit of space in the iPhone camera arrangement.

Kudo’s to Apple adding in Macro pictures that are clear without needing to add another camera. I was saying how crazy 4+ camera’s are getting on phones today. Ideally with periscope hood glass lens and this tech should be reduced down to 2!

Still I was hoping for 10x optical zoom for both and at least 5x/10x Pro/Max. Alas that’ll be next year.

I fully expect a major camera redesign next year. It’s telling Apple has reached their finite space in the iPhone models in the Pro and Pro Max.
widest angle is 13mm, tele - 120mm, so it's almost 10x of so called "zoom"
 
I was saying how crazy 4+ camera’s are getting on phones today. Ideally with periscope hood glass lens and this tech should be reduced down to 2!
"Real" zooms suffer from smaller aperture.
So there has to be "normal" focal length fixed lens for low light.
And for ultra-wide since zoom can't reach that wide...

Maybe 2 periscopes (ultra-wide & ultra tele) in addition of one fixed normal lens would be possible, but Apple doesn't want to give that much volume and cost for cameras...
 
Digital zoom is a waste of time that can basically be achieved by cropping in post, ...
I have heard that, in the more recent iPhones, the sensor is taking multiple/continuous images that the processor is combining into a single image, and if you zoom in digitally, it puts more effort into the zoomed in area. This is something that cannot be achieved by just cropping in post - you don't have access to all those other images the phone used.
 
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"Real" zooms suffer from smaller aperture.
So there has to be "normal" focal length fixed lens for low light.
And for ultra-wide since zoom can't reach that wide...

Maybe 2 periscopes (ultra-wide & ultra tele) in addition of one fixed normal lens would be possible, but Apple doesn't want to give that much volume and cost for cameras...
OMG. What about wide angle zoom lenses like Tokina AT-X PRO SD 14-20mm F2?
Wide/ultrawide lenses are shorter anyways, why would you fold them?
 
Honestly I was hoping for 10x optical zoom across both Pro’s or at least 5x optical on the Pro and 10x optical on the Max.

Huge opportunity missed unfortunately. Seems more R&D went o the action button, titanium 5 alloy, ANC during calls on iPhone itself before optical zoom.
think apple are planning longer optical range for 16 pros. They aren't going to debut it with the best they can think of in one upgrade. Not the apple way.

5x is still a big improvement on what we had currently and i expect 10x to be very good as well still.
 
why did it feel like they weren't THAT proud of their telephoto feature?
it was kinda rushed and did not really impress in any way.
i expected a much bigger deal in the presentation.
i hope it's really worth buying the Max.
 
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"Real" zooms suffer from smaller aperture.
So there has to be "normal" focal length fixed lens for low light.
And for ultra-wide since zoom can't reach that wide...

Maybe 2 periscopes (ultra-wide & ultra tele) in addition of one fixed normal lens would be possible, but Apple doesn't want to give that much volume and cost for cameras...

Why can’t a lens be made for ultra wide be positioned or setup to achieve such pictures be mounted over the Normal lens? Either automatically managed or by a proper threaded add-on the end user chooses to bring and use when they want it.

For over a decade, in my mind, taking pictures forma. Single camera phone worked for a wide shot when I wanted to but rarely did I ever want an ultra wide. Is it me or the phone industry pushed this into the public when it really wasn’t asked for (??) or am I completely wrong?

Is it hard to gauge consumers wants in what the camera can do in a phone when a specific focus began showing up in say the first 5 phones on market vs other features of the phone that end users have purchased a phone model of choice having ultra wide when it first was introduced?
 
You can replicate 100x zoom by just taking a 25x photo and then cropping off the sides. It's kinda pointless. Also have you ever looked at the "quality" of a 100x zoom photo? It's pretty bad. Might be useful as a tool to read a sign but as a photo, it's terrible. 10x digital zoom on a 10MP image so it's what, a 1MP image?
 
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