They have different sensors, the Pro / Pro Max Main wide sensors are considerable larger ones at 1/1.28'' (1,22 µm) at 24 mm, while the iPhone 16 / Plus have an 8 x 6 mm main wide sensor with 1,0 µm per pixel, about 20% smaller. However, that allows for the 1.6 lens an the - partially - compensation of the smaller sensor.
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iPhone 16 Lineup to Introduce Wave of Camera Improvements
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They have different sensors, the Pro / Pro Max Main wide sensors are considerable larger ones at 1/1.28'' (1,22 µm) at 24 mm, while the iPhone 16 / Plus have an 8 x 6 mm main wide sensor with 1,0 µm per pixel, about 20% smaller. However, that allows for the 1.6 lens an the - partially - compensation of the smaller sensor.
Really wish the headphone jack would return. Wired audio and wired headsets with mics are so vastly superior for audio quality, sound, and error-free communication (no dropouts, no bluetooth problems). Wifi and bluetooth are pure garbage compared to the quality of wired audio and headsets -- and people unquestionably can hear the difference, on both ends.
Would Apple announce something more specials than those at the event? Or those are really much confirmed by now
It's a kind of boring for iPhone every year now. Only processor and camera improvements. Nothing else. No wow factor since FaceID was introduced.
Skipping all the comments as I know 95% are negative. I’m excited🤷🏾♂️
Me too! I’m super stoked and I’m only coming from a 15PM. I’m hooked on upgrading yearly through a trade in with T-Mobile so I don’t pay full price. This time of year is so much fun for me
It's the same sensor IMX803 1/1.28" in the 14/15 Pro/Max, but somehow they've managed to make the minimum focus distance of 20 cm no longer sufficient for the 15 Pro/Max and is more like 30-25 cm. And the depth of field is larger too. On closer inspection and comparison, you can unfortunately see that the 15 Pro/Max in 48 MP ProRAW no longer shows fine details at all and is also blurrier. It is probably due to the change in the lens. I took thousands of photos in museums with the 14 Pro and initially thought my first 15 Pro was defective. However, the 24 MP photos of the 15 Pro are significant better than the 12 MP photos of the 14 Pro if you don't need fine detail in high resolution images like I do. Enough to downgrade to the 14 pro again.
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really?Me too! I’m super stoked and I’m only coming from a 15PM. I’m hooked on upgrading yearly through a trade in with T-Mobile so I don’t pay full price. This time of year is so much fun for me
I don't want a 48 mexapixel camera most of the time.
For 98% of my images, it's just going to eat up precious storage space.
That's more megapixels than Nikon's flagship $6,500 camera. Which has a much larger sensor (in general the smaller the sensor, the less megapixels you want, or you get noise).
A 48 MP cell phone camera is a ridiculous idea.
But most people don't understand what MP means in an image, and just think it's a spec where higher = better, and don't realize that generally the only "improvement" you get is a larger file you can zoom into further.
Sony sells a professional 12MP camera for $3,500. (A7S III)
High MP can be advantageous in certain niche cases, but it's also a drawback in many others (which is why there is a market for professional low MP cameras like the Sony)
But that's the point, despite its small size and inexpensive lens, I can see more fine details with the 14 Pro in 48 MP ProRAW when I look at pictures of paintings I've taken in museums enlarged and zoomed in on the 32” display. I can't see these details with either the 15 Pro or my Leica M10 with 50mm Summicron. Like fine craquelures or the weaving of the canvas.
The telephoto zoom is where you want the 48mp, it allows you to blow up the zoomed photo while retain the detail, so the photo are still usable such as getting printed. My uncle is a pro sports photographer for 30+ years (retired now), his #1 complain for the iPhone camera is photo resolution is too low to be usable.
He showed me using his Nikon to take a zoomed photo, afterwards cropping out like 40% of the photo, what’s left still had enough resolution to be printed clearly as a decent sized print. Then trying using iPhone photo taken with similar zoom, its cropped image is too blurry and unusable. That’s just purely due to the lack of megapixel (No low light etc played a role, it was a sunny day still photo - basically perfect condition)
I want to reinforce this. People take telephoto shots for a variety of reasons, but one (the main?) reason is reach.
And if that is the case it makes sense that the tele lens is where many shots will benefit from having higher resolution for cropping. Just making the telelens field of view narrower (effective focal length longer) is not a good solution on a camera as the gap between the main sensor and the tele one becomes quite large and you are left with a large span of FOVs are left with low resolution because the amount of cropping required of the main sensor is too much.
raw sensor definition (before iphone resamples)
24mm -> 48MP
28mm -> 35MP
35mm -> 23MP
48mm -> 12MP
76mm -> 4.8MP
100mm (pro max) -> 2.8MP
119mm (pro max) -> 2MP
I use the tele lens on the 15PM for more than half my shots with the phone. It’s just how I see the world I guess. Correspondingly, that is where I would most value improvements.
(PS. Cropping is arguably how phones create ”tele” lenses in the first place. The actual focal length of the tele lens in the 14PM is similar to the main sensor lens. It’s just that the sensor below it is 4x3mm which creates the narrower field of view. The sensor behind the folded optics of the 15PM is only somewhat larger. I’d like to see a significantly larger, and higher resolution tele sensor. If they could use the pixel design of the IMX903 it would be particularly appreciated on these smaller sensors!)
Interesting. I’m not exactly an audio expert, but I’m curious about trying wired headsets. In your opinion, which brands or models are the top choices for audiophiles if budget isn’t an issue?
Same here 💪😎. My wife and I upgrade our phones every year, but we sell our old ones on resale platforms. This way, we recover about 80% of what we initially spent. We consider the 20% loss as a ‘yearly rental fee,’ which usually works out to around $20 a month. It’s a small price to pay to always have the latest and greatest tech in our backpacks.Me too! I’m super stoked and I’m only coming from a 15PM. I’m hooked on upgrading yearly through a trade in with T-Mobile so I don’t pay full price. This time of year is so much fun for me
If I could afford to buy outright that’s definitely what I’d do! I just absolutely do not have $1200 to spend at once on anything especially a phone, so I pay $50/month to T-Mobile for a year and then upgrade and send my old phone in. It’s worth it to me and my low income and bad credit 😅
Opening up the aperture for an ultra-wide lens by 1/3 stop is not a big deal at all and will be irrelevant in photos. With these small sensors completely irrelevant. They are selling the same package over and over and compensate the shortcomings with software. Difficult to say how much I’m fed up with the camera of the 12 mini. Terrible dynamic range, no zoom, false colours, artificial bokeh. Does the job to memorise some moments but as a camera it is nothing to brag about. Now it gets ‘improvements’. Good. Whatever improvements they come up with, they will never defy the laws of physics. Which means they will never be able to open up the aperture enough in order to provide a reasonable bokeh or low-light performance.
In my opinion, the biggest improvement they can do is to vastly upgrade the sensor’s dynamic range. Which, having in mind who the mass user of the iphone is, is never going to happen. So, enjoy the improvement from f/2.4 to f/2.2, you can always fool yourself your pictures have become better because of it.
Get this $9 thingy:
Yes. But do we want 50MB image files for *all* the thousands of photos we take, just so we can have that option on a telephoto shot we might take with a phone?
I'm much more prolific with my phone shooting than my dedicated camera. Taking several casual, throwaway type photos every day. And I rarely even need the 40+MP from my dedicated camera, much less my phone. I think I'd run through my storage space in 90 days with a 49MP sensor. Or is it ONLY on the telephoto and not the standard camera?
Also as a photographer, it's very difficult to get a good quality telephoto image from a phone which is:
A) hand held
B) has a small sensor 9.8 x 7.3 mm vs 24x36
C) has a tiny lens (few mm versus over a foot in dedicated cameras)
It's not difficult to make a great wide angle to normal lens with a tiny sensor, but not telephoto. That's one reason the giant paparazzi cameras with huge lenses are still around for sports and news and wildlife.
Also to briefly geek out, the main reason you find pro level cameras with Megapixels in the range of 20-40 (and even as low as 12 as I pointed out earlier) is because above that DIGITAL NOISE gets to be a problem and the only way around that is a larger sensor. Phones have SMALL sensors so the "sweet spot" before noise gets to really degrade the image is MUCH less than 40MP.
If the wide/normal cameras are <40MP, I think a high MP telephoto camera module is OK for the masses.*
*This seems like the case:
Apple's iPhone 15 and 15 Pro: Imaging tech examined
This year’s iPhone 15 camera story seems to be about megapixels - 48MP across the board - but it’s also as much about how Apple combines hardware with software to make photos that appeal to photographers and non-photographers alike.
www.dpreview.com
But maybe the whole thing is designed to drive subscription costs to iCloud storage anyway. And Apple is likely using some blurring effect that hides the noise anyway so it will probably look ok--especially if that's the only telephoto camera you own!
Apple should really focus on improving their HDR pipeline to match Google's.
I bought a Pixel 9 Pro XL to test out for a week or two since I know I'll never leave the Apple ecosystem but god damn it, the photos on the Pixel 9 Pro XL are just so damn good! Shadows aren't crushed, highlights are handled much better and overall just a more pleasing photo straight out of the camera.
It's not the hardware at this point, it's the processing and Apple's falling behind. Not by much at all but Google is king of still photos.
I bought a Pixel 9 Pro XL to test out for a week or two since I know I'll never leave the Apple ecosystem but god damn it, the photos on the Pixel 9 Pro XL are just so damn good! Shadows aren't crushed, highlights are handled much better and overall just a more pleasing photo straight out of the camera.
It's not the hardware at this point, it's the processing and Apple's falling behind. Not by much at all but Google is king of still photos.
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