I got a new iPhone. Mostly for the camera. Because that’s why you buy new phones.
New iPhone Camera says: “Easiest to use camera you have, just open it up and hit the button”.
New iPhone Camera also says:
There are three physical lenses: normal (1x), super wide (.5x), and medium telephoto (5x).
Yet the default set of focal length buttons at the bottom of the user interface has 4 choices: super wide (.5x), normal (1x), short telephoto (2x) and medium telephoto (5x).
Also when you hit the 1x button it toggles between up to 3 synthesized lens focal lengths: 24mm (1x), 28mm (1.2x) and 35mm (1.5x).
Also depending on which physical or synthesized lens you use you get a different effective resolution in the final file.
With the default settings: the super wide camera gives you 12MP, the 1x camera gives you 24MP, the short synthesized lenses (the “fusion camera”) give you 24MP, the 2x camera gives you 12MP, and the telephoto camera gives you 12MP.
With the MAX setting the super wide camera changes to 48MP, the 1x camera is 48MP, the 1.2x camera is 35MP, the 1.5x camera is 24MP, the 2x camera is 12MP, and the telephoto camera is 12MP.
With the RAW MAX setting all the resolutions are the same as above (48, 48, 35, 24, 12, 12), but the files are 5-10x bigger.
With the RAW 12 setting all the resolutions are 12MP and all the files are 5-10x bigger than with HEIC or JPEG.
If you set 12MP mode in the camera app settings and are not using MAX mode then the default resolutions all go to 12MP instead of whatever they were before. The default for this setting is “24MP”, but that only holds for the 1x, 1.2x and 1.5x cameras, as established above.
Finally, all the special computational camera modes (night mode, macro, etc) all fall back to 12MP. At least that’s the best guess we have as of this writing. What this means is even with all of the elaborate machinery above, most of your food pictures will still be 12MP. Which means most of your pictures will be 12MP.
Also there is a new second button on the side of the phone. The nice thing it does is instantly open the camera app. It can also be a shutter button. But if you are used to using the physical buttons on the other side of the phone for this it will feel odd to use the camera “upside down”.
The other thing it does is let you noodle all kinds of different capture settings, all of which you can also set with the regular touch UI with more speed and precision (in the opinion of the writer). The most confusing of these settings is “depth” which looks like it is letting you set aperture, but actually it’s just setting the fake aperture that the fake shallow depth of field effect is pretending to create.
This is all I’ve been able to figure out in one morning of noodling with the camera. In our next episode we will discuss exactly what photo “styles” do.
There is a whole other bank of settings for video, which I never use.
Also I never use the front camera, so I have no idea.
Postscript: After shooting with the camera a while after posting this I ended up just always using whatever the mostly default settings are (12mp, 24mp, 12mp and HEIC not RAW). For me the various large size/high resolution files don’t seem to be much of a win over the regular baked stuff. I’ve never had good luck with RAW on the phone even though it’s what I use everywhere else. And paying 75MB per picture on a phone seems exorbitant.