iPhone 15 Pro Max Poor quality photographs of text on iPhone 15 Pro Max

[ric22]

What's the cause of the iPhone 15 Pro Max's problems photographing text and pictures? Over processing? Unfortunate focal length?

I realised it is worse at doing it- a lot worse- than an iPhone SE2.

Have a look at these two photos, both taken from the same distance, then zoomed in. Both were photographs of a full A4 page. IPhone 15 Pro Max image first.

 

[ric22]

Let's compare now to my old iPhone 6, which I dug out, charged up and turned on for the sake of this little experiment.

Apple, seriously?!? What the heck?!?

 

[juanmaasecas]

What's the cause of the iPhone 15 Pro Max's problems photographing text and pictures? Over processing? Unfortunate focal length?

I realised it is worse at doing it- a lot worse- than an iPhone SE2.

Have a look at these two photos, both taken from the same distance, then zoomed in. Both were photographs of a full A4 page. IPhone 15 Pro Max image first.

View attachment 2349257
View attachment 2349258

Likely a combination of factors
- iPhone 15 pro has a bigger sensor, bigger lens that can’t focus as close as before. Also typically lenses at close focus distances are not as sharp.
Maybe the picture is slightly out of focus, or as the lens is wider, you’re actually cropping the picture more…

- post processing: the main camera has now 50mpx that are very small and might have tons of noise. Apple is reducing noise and doing their hdr AI tricks, that reduce detail…

- maybe the phone is automatically switching to the wide angle sensor/lens for macro (which has lower quality) and cropping even more, resulting in lower quality…

For these kind of “scanning documents” application it has been demonstrated previously on the forum that older iPhones are better than the newer ones…

 

[ric22]

Likely a combination of factors
- iPhone 15 pro has a bigger sensor, bigger lens that can’t focus as close as before. Also typically lenses at close focus distances are not as sharp.
Maybe the picture is slightly out of focus, or as the lens is wider, you’re actually cropping the picture more…

- post processing: the main camera has now 50mpx that are very small and might have tons of noise. Apple is reducing noise and doing their hdr AI tricks, that reduce detail…

- maybe the phone is automatically switching to the wide angle sensor/lens for macro (which has lower quality) and cropping even more, resulting in lower quality…

For these kind of “scanning documents” application it has been demonstrated previously on the forum that older iPhones are better than the newer ones…

Thanks for the reply. 👍

Lenses were clean, multiple photos were taken with the 15PM to try to get good ones, distance to book was similar, all images were of the full page so not a super close up, main sensor was used- in fact I tried all of them- with none doing well.

I took a screen grab while in camera, and even zooming in that looked better than the finished product. Which leads me to conclude it's mainly a problem of crappy post processing.

I've had friends and family commenting how poor the photos are from my 15PM... mainly due to the distortion issues when taking portraits, with the lens requiring you to stand further away so that the subject's entire body doesn't get near the edges of the frame and become distorted. Then crop the image down afterwards. 5x zoom lenses and wide angle lenses are just novelties to use a couple of times a year. Night time photos are great at least! I think the vast majority of people would be better off with the SE2 camera than the 15PM camera for still images, sadly. At least until Apple un-f*ck the processing.

I don't dislike the phone- I think it's excellent overall- I just find the cameras a big let down.

 

[winxmac]

2017 camera with A13 Bionic vs 2023 camera with A17 Pro

Some reviewers on YouTube said that iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max are the best ones to use for close up/macro

iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max keeps the same focus distance as with iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max

As an owner of iPhone 14 Pro Max, I still don't understand why Apple limited it to Smart HDR 4 which was used by iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max and now iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max has Smart HDR 5

 

[ric22]

I'm finding it hard to work out what they're attempting with the focal length? It's bad at short range and bad for body-length portraits... I had to set it to 1.2% zoom to reduce the edge distortion that wrecks so many photos.

 

[juanmaasecas]

As you increase the sensor size, you need to make the lens wider so that you keep the global camera module size in check. Longer focal lengths need obviously more space.

24mm is maybe better for some landscape and that’s all.

The std lens should go back to 35mm
Then maybe the ultra wide angle at around 15-16mm is enough
Then the portrait lens at 85-100mm

 

[Deifie]

Lenses were clean, multiple photos were taken with the 15PM to try to get good ones, distance to book was similar, all images were of the full page so not a super close up, main sensor was used- in fact I tried all of them- with none doing well.

Do you have macro control enabled in camera settings? Because the camera app will switch to ultrawide lense once your to close for the main camera to focus. When it does this it will still show 1x at the zoom selection so only way to know if it switched lenses is if you have maco control enabled and see the icon lighting up...

 

[sdante]

- post processing: the main camera has now 50mpx that are very small and might have tons of noise. Apple is reducing noise and doing their hdr AI tricks, that reduce detail…

I guess larger lens would help but the 48Mp sensor they use is so called quad bayer, meaning it has only one color filter for each group of 4 pixels, so in my interpretation it has about same color resolution as 12Mp camera . Also this IMHO causes that 2x "zoom" is practically useless in terms of fine details as it pretty much looks like what you get from 3Mp sensor.

I would rather prefer the same 2x sensor + lens as in 12 Pro in 15 PM and do that (for me) useless 1x zoom digitally with 0.5x lens+sensor (and maybe use that 48Mp sensor in this). I almost only take photos using 2x zoom and with that I don't like at all what my 15 PM gives. Surely photos have punchy contrast and colors but fine detail is poor (it shows horribly when taking photos of furry friends like cats). For now I try to use 5x instead but it is difficult due to needed long distance to object and it require a lot of light so indoors shots challenging.

 

[ric22]

Do you have macro control enabled in camera settings? Because the camera app will switch to ultrawide lense once your to close for the main camera to focus. When it does this it will still show 1x at the zoom selection so only way to know if it switched lenses is if you have maco control enabled and see the icon lighting up...

I'll investigate and report my findings 🤓

 

[Johnny Jackhammer]

Any new information on this? I have taken some photos of textbooks and even using RAW 12 the text looks terrible. Definitely a processing issue. This is a screenshot taken of the image in Affinity Photo at 100% in RAW.

Using ProCam.app solves this issue.

 

[ric22]

Any new information on this? I have taken some photos of textbooks and even using RAW 12 the text looks terrible. Definitely a processing issue. This is a screenshot taken of the image in Affinity Photo at 100% in RAW.

View attachment 2408078

Using ProCam.app solves this issue.

View attachment 2408080

I've moaned about this a few times on here. No change seen yet. If you take a photo you see it looking good for a split second, before the post processing kicks in and destroys it. My old iPhone 6 does a better job of photographing text 🤦‍♂️

 

[User #07242024]

Any new information on this? I have taken some photos of textbooks and even using RAW 12 the text looks terrible. Definitely a processing issue. This is a screenshot taken of the image in Affinity Photo at 100% in RAW.

View attachment 2408078

Using ProCam.app solves this issue.

View attachment 2408080

Hi, which ProCam app? I found several on the App Store.
What settings did you use for ProCam?

 

[lewchenko]

Quite an eye opening thread this. Disappointing too that things have got so much worse. Genuinely feel that all this sensor cropping & post processing rather than pure optical lenses is having a detrimental effect in many scenarios.

Also .. 5x “zoom” on the newer phones …. I have x3 on my iPhone 13Pro and when taking portrait shots I have to stand way back already. 5x will make that even worse. Or use somewhere in between and get a non optically optimised image.