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- Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots – Flickr
Phone cameras don’t change that much year-to-year, but those changes really add up over two or three! In this solo show Bart illustrates this point with his experiences upgrading from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to a 17 Pro Max.
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Notes
I don’t update my phone every year, and I prefer to keep the topics for this show platform-agnostic, but this year I upgraded my phone from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to an iPhone 17 Pro Max, and I’m impressed by the level of improvement. I want to share my experience as an example of how much phone cameras are still evolving, even this far into the category's development. The specifics will be different with similar high-end phones from other vendors like Google and Samsung, but given how competitive this market is, the experiences should be similar. Two years of Google Pixel evolution should feel as impressive as two years of Samsung Galaxy evolution which should feels similar to my experience with two years of iPhone evolution.
It's More than Just the Obvious Stuff
Let's just get this out of the way, yes, everything got a little better! The whole interface is a little faster, the screen is a little nicer, there is a little less lag saving complex images like night mode shots, and all the improvements in Machine Learning and the normal sensor evolution means the final images all look a little nicer.
If any of that wasn't true I'd feel disappointed!
What interests me are the changes that are more than just 'similar but better' — the changes which make meaningfully affect how I shoot with my phone.
Playing Catchup — Powerful Hardware Camera Controls
The only new camera feature the iPhone 16 Pro lineup offered that even briefly tempted me to upgrade last year was the introduction of Apple's new Camera Control button. This wasn’t enough to justify upgrading, but I was looking forward to experiencing it next time I did upgrade. Especially because what Apple created sounded spookily like what I described in LTP 132 "Phone Camera Wishlist".
I spent the last year watching others experiment with Camera Control without being able try it myself. I had very high hopes for the feature initially, but watching people I trust and respect try and then abandon it my expectations had been tempered.
I won't bury the lede — I like it, and what's more, I use it! But I needed to tweak the settings to make it work well for me.
I think that might be at the root of a lot of people's disappointment — camera ergonomics are deeply personal, because we all shoot differently, so different controls matter more and less to each of us. No one standard setup can ever be perfect for us all!
Camera Control is Not Just a Button!
Other vendors beat Apple to providing a simple hardware button to launch the camera and take a photo. Apple let you do that with the Action Button before adding the Camera Control button, but they were following other vendors' lead. Strangely, by default, that's also all the new Camera Control button does.
But the button can do a lot more because it’s actually a small capacitive strip with pressure sensitivity. The ‘button’ can detect two levels of ‘click’, and two directions of swipe gesture. I believe all the advanced features were actually enabled by default when the iPhones 16 launched, but they caused so much confusion for regular phone users who just wanted a button to snap their kid being cute quickly and easily, that Apple changed the default. For casual camera users the advanced capabilities are a hindrance rather than a help, so I think having them opt-in makes sense.
Today, photographers that want to enable all the camera control button’s super powers need to open the camera settings in the system settings app to enable it. This has the nice side-effect ensuring that everyone who enables the advanced mode sees that it’s configurable, but you don’t just fine a single on-off toggle in there!
Camera Control's Default Advanced Behaviour (Do Everything!)
With the button flipped to advanced mode clicking the button still opens the camera, and clicking again fires the shutter. In other words, the basis behaviour remains the same (good!).
What has changed is that the camera control button is now associated with a specific photographic setting. To start changing that setting half-press on the button until a new menu appears directly under the button. This shows you the setting you're controlling, and what will happen when you swipe in either direction. For example, if the selected setting is exposure compensation then half-pressing will reveal the exposure compensation icon and show your current compensation value and a scale you can scroll along.
To change the active setting you need to do something I find difficult — double-half-press. Doing that weird gesture changes the menu to a setting picker which you swipe through and select a new setting by half-clicking or just dwelling for a few seconds.
Taking Control of Camera Control
Different people will have different experiences with the ergonomics of this button. I have no problem half-pressing or swiping, but I find double-half-pressing fiddly. I can do it pretty reliably now after some practice, but I still don't like it!
So, that means I want to minimise my use of that gesture.
As I experimented with camera control I learned what I found natural and what I didn't, and because I had been forced to open the setting to enable the advanced mode in the first place I knew I had options to tweak it.
Firstly, you can actually disable the gestures you don’t like, so there’s actually a spectrum of complexity available. I decided to leave all the top-level gestures enabled, and to make my changes at a more fine-grained level.
The big change I made was to re-order and filter down the setting that appear in the setting selector when you double-half-tap. Each setting can be toggled on and off, and there are drag bars to re-order the ones you keep. By default all the settings are enabled, but I really don't care about many of them. I don’t use photographic styles, so why would I them cluttering up that fiddly list?
The thing I want to do most often is flip between the optical-quality zoom levels, which Apple refers to as cameras, so I need that setting to always be the default when I half-click, so I moved that to the top of my list. Sometimes I want to add some exposure compensation, so there is value for me in having that setting available via the fiddly double-half-click gesture, so that got moved up to second. After some procrastination I also left the depth-of-field setting enabled, but I disabled all the rest. Having this list pared right down and ordered my way has greatly reduced the times I accidentally switch to the wrong setting!
My Camera Control Experience?
It took me a little while to get comfortable with Camera Control, and not until after I realised the importance of fine-tuning its configuration, but it’s now proving genuinely nice to have. Not a must-have, but I’d be quite cranky if Apple killed it!
Oh — I should also mention that Apple’s own lanyard case works perfectly with the camera control button, at least for me. More impressively still, both the bare button and the button through the Apple case are proving to work reliably, even for half-clicking and swiping, when I have capacitive gloves on — very important for me in winter!
I think every serious iPhone photographer should try the advanced mode for a week or two, being sure to refine the settings every few days as they gain experience. If after a few weeks it's still more of a hassle than a help, flip it back to the default mode and enjoy having a button that always gets you to a photo in two clicks!
4x Telephoto is a Game-Changer
The reason I upgraded last time was mostly due to the iPhone 15 Pro Max introducing a periscoping telephoto lens to the iPhone for the first time. Again, Apple were not the fist to try this, but their tetraprism design was original, and on paper at least, it looked very interesting.
Why the iPhone 15 Pro Max Telephoto Disappointed
After two years of real-world use it seems clear to me that Apple were at the very edge of their capabilities with that 5x telephoto. While the lens isn’t useless, it has proven a lot less useful than I’d hoped.
The sensor behind the 5x telephoto is less capable than the on on the primary lens, having just a quarter the resolution, and 5x of optical zoom had proved both too much and too little. Remember that the laws of physics dictate that The more you zoom the dimmer the light hitting the sensor gets. This is because you’re stretching less of the real world across more of the frame so there is less light per pixel. Again, physics tells us that less signal means a worse signal-to-noise ratio, so noise was always a concern, and it proved to be a real limiting factor. It’s not that you saw the noise directly, it’s that the noise was too much for the image processing pipeline to handle elegantly, so it resulted in unpleasant artefacting in anything less than perfect light.
I’d expected to use the 5x to take my macros to the next level, but that proved impractical in the real world. My experience was that there was rarely enough light when I wanted to capture an insect or something like that, so the noise suppression destroyed all the detail, leaving fake-looking cartoony images.
What makes it worse is that a lot of the time 5x is actually more zoom than I really want! Worse, when I do need as much as 5x I almost always need more than 5x. So, most of the time the real world was too dark for the zoom to take good macros or too far away for 5x to be enough!
The telephoto on the iPhone 16 Pro Max was mostly un-changed, so I had no interest in that upgrade, and friends and family who did update confirmed my expectations — the lens remained as compromised as ever.
Why the iPhone 17 Pro Telephotos is so Much Better
With the iPhone 17 Pro line Apple had a really big re-think, and they nailed it!
Optically they stuck with their innovative tetraprism design, but they reduced the optical zoom level to 4x, and quadrupled the sensor resolution so it has enough pixels to make use of pixel binning. The sensor is also two years more advanced, so it’s inherently less noisy too.
By reducing the optical zoom to 4x the camera feels natural far more often. Those situations where the 5x was just a little too much work wonderfully at 4x.
More importantly though, the fact that the light is being stretched less makes it inherently less noisy, and when you combine that with the power of pixel binning when multiple physical pixels feed into individual logical pixels, the signal-to-noise improves even more. Those two factors combined mean the 4x telephotos captures amazing detail in real-world lighting conditions, making it a truly useful lens!
The 8x Telephoto is Surprisingly Good
But wait, there’s more! Now that there are so many physical pixels, the centre quarter of the sensor can be used as individual logical pixels to give an optical quality 8x zoom at the same resolution we previously got from the 5x telephoto. The 8x zoom struggles more in low light than the 4x, but with the more modern sensor I’m finding it a little less noisy than the 5x in the real world. This doesn’t feel like a near miss at the edge of what’s possible, but a genuinely useful bonus extra when conditions allow.
The end result is that I find myself using the 4x telephoto a lot. In fact, the 4x has all but replaced my use of the cropped 2x lens (the centre pixels of the main sensor).
Meanwhile, the 8x telephoto continues to surprise me. My initial take was that it was more zoom at the same quality as the 5x, but now I think it’s actually less noise at a greater zoom. It’s not a lens I need often, but when I do it‘s working well for me.
My Bottom Line on the Lens Changes
The end result is that the three zoom levels I now use most often line up with the in-cropped versions of the three physical camera — I love the 0.5x wide angle as much as ever, the 1x primary remains my most used lens, and I now use the 4x telephotos about as much as the wide angle. This is similar to my usages pattern the first time Apple gave us three lenses when I regularly used 0.5x, 1x & 3x.
In hind sight, I think Apple messed up by making the step from 1x to 5x too big. Think about it, the physical lenses on the iPhone 15 and 16 Pro Max models jumped 0.5x → 1x → 5x, and even when you merged in the one supported crop mode the last step was still quite the leap, going 0.5x → 1x → 2x → 5x. But the iPhones 17 Pro give a much more equal progression from 0.5x → 1x → 4x, and it looks even better when you merge in the two crop modes to give 0.5x → 1x → 2x → 4x → 8x.
Final Thoughts
The details will differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the pattern should be the same — phone cameras are still in the rapid development stage of their life cycles. Some day that will plateaux, and the changes will become purely incremental quality of life tweaks, but we’re clearly not there yet, at least not at the high end of the smartphone market!
Upgrading every year seems excessive to me, but after two or three years you’ll really get meaningful improvements!