I started 4 days ago 3 month iPhone Challenge. My plan is to take only pictures with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max. I hope to understand how good these smartphone cameras are, in reality.
When you are looking to the wonderful and colorful advertisement Pictures and Videos produces with the iPhone16 Pro Max and published on the Apple homepage you wan to throw away all your bulky equipment. Realty is, that 99% of these pictures are made in bright day even sun light or extreme strong video lights. In that condition it´s easy to get a maximum result of color range and resolution out of the iPhone sensor. Of course there is also heavy postprocessing and since the iPhone 14 Pro even raw postprocessing in place.
In my tests I want to use the iPhone just like my Fujifilm X-Pro 3 without post processing in any kind of Software. My expectation is to use the images as they are processed with in the iPhone.
As described, with any camera even the worst smartphone camera in bright day light its easy to make “nice” pictures with great colors. My tests the last two days has been taking images in the late winter afternoon with less day light. My first judgement is that I am happy with the results. Colors and details are good some even very good.
Translated in to full frame lenses the three iPhone lenses have 13mm with 48MP, 24mm with 48MP and 120mm with 12MP.
My typical comfort zone is the range between 35mm to 50mm focal length. At this focal length the distortions are minimal and People are not deformed. My perfect setup for my loved street photography.
At the iPhone those focal lengths are produced with the 24mm lens providing 35mm with 24MP and 48mm with 12 MP.
To simplify my tests and results to you, I added the focal length I used to take the pictures in these lower light condition. In some cases I took even the same image with 13- 24- 35mm to show the change in distortion and difference in image quality.
Conclusion
All in all I am happy with the quality. The 24-35 mm Images are great. Decent colors even at this bad light and more then enough details. But please judge yourself. Those images are just straight out of the JPG converter of the iPhone. I am expecting even better quality when I will later in my iPhone Project use third party photo apps where I can control ISO and speed of the iPhone cameras. For the moment I am happy with those first results. Please leave me your findings and impressions when you are looking to the images.