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iPhone 16 Pro Max Rumored to Feature Super Telephoto Camera
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It's not directly comparable. What 3x would mean is three times the lowest focal length.
The 14 Pro main camera is 24mm, so 300mm would be approximately 12x.
Yeah, and honestly 6.3" is pretty big. I have a 13 mini and a 13 Pro, and the 13 Pro is too big and too heavy already.
The 3x telephoto lens is "good enough". Rather than bumping the phone chassis size up more to stuff in a telephoto lens with more zoom, I wish they'd just work on improving the 2x or 3x lens to make it fit into a reasonably sized phone.
No it isn't, IMO.
The whole point of a periscope lens is to be able to fit a longer zoom into a similarly sized chassis.
Disappointing that the Pro won't get the features of the Pro Max. Start calling one a Semi Pro and the other the Pro.
No time for camera bump haters, make it as big as it needs to be, once it’s in a case you don’t even know it’s there.
Oh and can someone let these haters know that a periscope lens in smartphones eliminates the need for a protruding lens element, on the tele lens at least?
You’d think a 1mm protrusion on the back of these phones was life or death for some.
Oh and can someone let these haters know that a periscope lens in smartphones eliminates the need for a protruding lens element, on the tele lens at least?
You’d think a 1mm protrusion on the back of these phones was life or death for some.
"Super telephoto" sounds about right for something apple would name. It took a lot of courage to include this SUPER TELEPHOTO lens and we think you will love it..
Honestly, I think if the bump was more in a location that it doesn't cause the phone to rock, people wouldn't be so up in arms. I feel like the way google does it with their pixel line (the bar across the middle) would make sense since at least then you can lay it down and not wobble on a table without using a case.
Um, I'm pretty sure that the periscope feature means that the camera bump can be much smaller (if not eliminated) due to more of the optics being offset by the prism.i can't wait to see the camera bump
phones take good enough photos. get rid of the stupid camera bump for goodness sake.
If you all are curious how thick a phone needs to be the Samsung S22 and S23 Ultra already offer this type of camera zoom. These phones feature no camera bump at all, with lenses built almost flush against the back. My S23 Ultra isn’t much thicker than my 12 Pro max. (I recently switched from 14 Pro Max to 12 Pro Max).
I get reliable acceptable quality at 30x zoom. 10x optical zoom is excellent in good daylight conditions and very good in low light. 100x zoom will allow me to identify objects over a great distance but won’t produce a usable image.
I’m interested in seeing what Apple can do with its periscope zoom because in low light like at a restaurant, I noticed my 14 Pro Max on digital zoom produced a clearer image than my S23 Ultra’s optical zoom. I think both were set to 10x. I was expecting more noise from the iPhone but the software processing cleaned that up better than Samsung’s did.
While iPhone 13 pro and 14 Pro image processing software can at times be too aggressive, it gets surprisingly good results out of the hardware.
I don’t understand why they can’t offer this super zoom stuff this year but my guess is that it will take them that long to get the software processing to work properly with the hardware.
Samsung released everything a couple of generations ago when it was still pretty rough and boy were customers mad about it. I sat that one out but my husband bought the model with the big periscope zoom and none of the lenses gave very good images. I think Apple will seek to avoid such a rough introduction.
Even now, Samsung’s camera can be a bit unpredictable. That’s why I used my 14 Pro Max to record most of our prom and graduation photos. The Samsung results can be better but can sometimes be worse. The iPhone results were more predictable.
My favorite phone camera to work with belonged to my Pixel 6 Pro and now my Pixel 7a. The hardware on my 7a isn’t the best but the camera controls are smooth and intuitive with easy control over color temperature and exposure and I get great results out of the hardware. I’d love to have that software on my iPhone.
I get reliable acceptable quality at 30x zoom. 10x optical zoom is excellent in good daylight conditions and very good in low light. 100x zoom will allow me to identify objects over a great distance but won’t produce a usable image.
I’m interested in seeing what Apple can do with its periscope zoom because in low light like at a restaurant, I noticed my 14 Pro Max on digital zoom produced a clearer image than my S23 Ultra’s optical zoom. I think both were set to 10x. I was expecting more noise from the iPhone but the software processing cleaned that up better than Samsung’s did.
While iPhone 13 pro and 14 Pro image processing software can at times be too aggressive, it gets surprisingly good results out of the hardware.
I don’t understand why they can’t offer this super zoom stuff this year but my guess is that it will take them that long to get the software processing to work properly with the hardware.
Samsung released everything a couple of generations ago when it was still pretty rough and boy were customers mad about it. I sat that one out but my husband bought the model with the big periscope zoom and none of the lenses gave very good images. I think Apple will seek to avoid such a rough introduction.
Even now, Samsung’s camera can be a bit unpredictable. That’s why I used my 14 Pro Max to record most of our prom and graduation photos. The Samsung results can be better but can sometimes be worse. The iPhone results were more predictable.
My favorite phone camera to work with belonged to my Pixel 6 Pro and now my Pixel 7a. The hardware on my 7a isn’t the best but the camera controls are smooth and intuitive with easy control over color temperature and exposure and I get great results out of the hardware. I’d love to have that software on my iPhone.
I will get one more year of security updates for my iPhone X, so this will be perfect timing.
It’s way more than 1mm. The bump is almost half the chassis depth or a third of the overall depth.
When periscope was first mentioned years ago the promise was that it would eliminate the bump. Instead the bump is remaining and it’s being used to add telephoto. Ok, but I wouldn’t mind an SE or something the just kept 2-3X optical and got rid of the bump instead.
And not everyone uses a case. I don’t use a case and never have.
What 1mm protrusion are you talking about? The camera bump has been well past 1mm for a long time now. It's thicker than a lot of thin cases which can still wobble when you put the phone down. Eliminating the bump from one lens is irrelevant if the others are still there.
Pre iPhone camera bump I didn't use a case on my phone. The current designs practically necessitate the use of a case, which make the phone thicker... If we're adding thickness anyway, I'd rather see it go to internal volume so battery capacity can be added without making the phone taller.
All I want is Apple to make one phone shorter and thicker. The 13 mini could have been a 13 mini pro if they just made the chassis thicker to compensate for the battery volume lost to a third lens, as one example. And it would lie flat on a table without a case.
It's an expected pattern nowadays. Apple has done this several times already, so no surprise here. They bring it first to the Plus/Max, and then later bring it to the smaller phone.
IOW, if we get the periscope lens in the 16 Pro Max, there is a good chance we'll see the periscope lens in the iPhone 17 Pro.
In the full-frame camera world, a 50mm* lens has traditionally been considered "normal," so a 300mm would be 6x magnification. And a 300 would be considered telephoto, not super telephoto (that description usually applies to lenses that start at 400mm or higher).
But all of that is based on a full frame sensor, akin to a 35mm piece of film. With a small iPhone sensor, a 300mm would truly be super telephoto. But since a phone is smaller than 300mm long, there's no way to actually put a 300mm "periscope" lens into a camera, which is why they would likely call this a "300mm equivalent." So putting a lens into a phone that is close to 6x or 7x, done purely optically without loss of quality, would be pretty cool.
*the actual number that compares to the field of view that humans perceive is closer to 43mm.
Great great. I'm was planning to get 16P or newer. Bring me more good stuff.
Right? The hump on this phone will be like the Nokia 808, which everyone chided because of the massive hump. At a certain point, the hump will be too obnoxiously large. A dedicated camera that is properly connected to the phone could be welcome. It's far better than the hacky Bluetooth connection to start a Wifi connect session with the phone - which is how all cameras work today, and it's terrible.
I think they might have to do that with next year's Pro Max.
Presumably a periscope lens lying sideways inside the phone is going to take up more space than the current lens assembly that simply points directly out of the back of the phone and, by the sound of this rumour, that periscope mechanism might take up even more internal space next year. If the dimensions of the main body don't change then that reduces the amount of internal space left over for the battery this year and maybe even more so next year.
Apple can probably compensate for less space for the battery to some extent by increasing component efficiency, and maybe by using stacked battery technology as rumoured in another article today (https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/17/iphone-15-could-feature-stacked-battery-technology/) to get more capacity from a physically smaller battery but if enough internal space gets eaten up year after year by ever bigger cameras then maybe Apple's only solution, if it doesn't want to start going backwards on battery life, might be to expand the thickness of the main body of the phone in order to add back in available internal space lost to the cameras.
Personally, like you, I would quite like that since right now I consider the overall thickness of my phone to be determined by the thickness of the main body plus the thickness of the camera bump right out to the face of the protruding lenses. It is the edges of those protruding lenses that tend to get caught on things when I put the phone in my pocket so bumping up the thickness of the main body by 1-2mm would make no difference to how well it fits in my pocket and would make the camera bump at least somewhat less prominent. Weight might be an issue of course but perhaps the rumoured switch to a titanium chassis will help there, at least a bit.
