I would say the 6S was the last big jump from the 8mp to the 12mp
2012-2020 is mainly software improvements with the exception of the 2015 6S
Processor + Software makes a difference.
But if the iPhone 6S had taken RAW Pictures.
It would mainly be the same as the 12 Pro
I have seen someone here post samples of the 6S pictures VS 12
I feel like Apple has cheated us with their sneaky marketing.
Even my budget point & shoot camera from 2013 takes better pictures than the 12.
You act like software improvements don’t matter much. Watch any video from a real photographer on YouTube, see what they think of smart hdr. It’s incredibly difficult to manually do what the iPhone does for smart hdr, and when you include deep fusion and night mode, you can’t really do that. The extended dynamic range in video is an amazing advance, something I wish my fancy full frame camera could do, and the implementation of Dolby Vision just takes it to the next level.
However, we’re dealing with small sensors and lenses, and they have limits, which to my surprise, they keep finding a way around with computational. For basic image quality, sure, real cameras can be better, but not only do they need the right lenses, they need good technique and also post processing to get a result that would look better to most people.
You can take a great full frame mirrorless camera, take a pic of your friend at the bar, and then look at it and wonder why their face is so dark, and so yellow. Then you might wonder why it looks so bright (overexposed) outside. So you take another picture, with a + 1 EV exposure, and the photo is blurry, so now you increase your shutter speed. Still yellow, so you change your white balance, setting it with your grey card which you of course carry at all times. Ok, now we’re getting somewhere, but the windows look super bright and it’s distracting, so you bust out your iPad Pro and USB-c sd card adapter and get that raw picture into Lightroom. You kill the highlights, and now the window looks better, maybe a bit too bluish, but the interior of the bar is dark, so you raise the shadows, and change your friends black hair to medium brown.
Now you think to yourself... Maybe it’s time for a selective edit? Or maybe, you start to think, no need to pixel peep so much, and the iPhone with all it’s computational processing does a pretty decent job handling all that in a fraction of a second and you could just leave your camera bag and iPad pro at home, unless you’re printing large or earning money from your photos.
