iPhone Diary: As expected, the camera improvements sold me an iPhone 15 Pro Max

Yep, I’m now a fully paid-up member of the Annual iPhone Upgrade Club. As of the iPhone X, I’ve upgraded every year to the iPhone 11, 12, 13, and 14. 

As usual, it’s the camera improvements that sold me on the new model – even though I’m fairly sure I’ll never actually use two of the biggest new features …

But let’s start with the other upgrades.

Titanium

While Apple made much of the new titanium frame, using that as the basis for the event logo, to me it’s pretty meh. My iPhone lives inside a case, so as pretty as the edges are, I’m never going to see them. And while the 21g weight saving is impressive in its own right, it’s not exactly going to make itself felt in everyday use.

Action button

I do like this. My iPhone is my main camera these days, and accounts for a significant part of my iPhone usage, so I love the idea of being able to pick it up and with one button open the camera app, and then use that same button as the shutter release.

I like the flexibility Apple has provided – including the ability to assign a Shortcut to the button – but mine will be set to the camera the moment I set it up, and I doubt I’ll ever use it for anything else.

A17 Pro processor

I honestly can’t think of a time when I’ve wished my iPhone were faster, so the generic claims Apple makes about speed each year never mean much to me.

However, I do recognize that the features I do care about – most notably the constant improvements in computational photography – are dependent on the annual chip improvements, so welcome the upgrade from that viewpoint.

USB-C with USB3 support

Hurrah! Finally I can stop carrying around two different cable types when traveling; I greatly welcome the simplicity of being able to use a single charger and cable for any of my Apple devices bar my Watch.

Having recently used my iPhone to shoot a significant amount of video footage (a story for another time), I also appreciate the ability to transfer large files at massively faster speeds.

The photo and video upgrades

Which brings us to what is for me the real point of upgrading…

24MP photos

I’m intrigued by this. Having experimented with the difference between 48MP RAW photos and 12MP HEIC ones on the iPhone 14 Pro Max, I acknowledged the benefits of the RAW format, but didn’t have too much use for the extra resolution. As I said then:

48MP images are much bigger than 12MP ones. Not just four times the size, as a typical iPhone user might expect, but generally around 20 times bigger! Here are examples from three of my photos:

• 2.5MB versus 49.7MB
• 3.6MB versus 69.9MB
• 3.6MB versus 61.9MB

While the 48MP image has more detail, it’s still clearly a capture from a small sensor with a cheap lens. The difference between the two, to me, doesn’t justify the massive increase in file size, nor the extra work in post-processing.

I will, then, continue to shoot 12MP photos almost all of the time – but will very occasionally flip that RAW switch.

That prediction was entirely accurate.

However, 24MP HEIC could be an interesting compromise, perhaps one I’ll use for travel photography. One driver here is future-proofing: as monitor resolution increases, lower-res photos start to look ever smaller.

As an extreme example, my first ever digital camera – the Sony Mavic, which saved photos to a floppy disk! – offered stunning 640×480 pixel resolution. Those looked fine for screens at the time, but of course look ridiculously tiny on any modern monitor. So there is an argument for keeping photos larger when we might want to view them many years from now.

Lens choices

The headline hardware feature is, of course, the 5x optical zoom of the new periscope lens, offering the 35mm equivalent of 120mm. That’s something I’ll enjoy playing with, as I literally can’t remember the last time I used a lens that long. I’m not sure how much use I’ll make of it, but options are good.

I really like the way that Apple has used the 48MP capability of the sensor to offer a range of focal lengths with the main camera: 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm. I suspect I’ll use 24mm as my default, but do like the convenience of that quick switch without messing around with zoom.

Auto Portrait mode

Speaking of convenience, the fact that you no longer need to manually select Portrait mode is a nice touch – as is the fact that it can automatically detect pet faces, as well as human ones.

Choose focal point after shooting

Many years ago, there was much excitement in the photography world over a new invention known as Light Field photograph, aka plenoptic cameras. These use an array of micro lenses to create photos whose focal point could be changed after taking the photo.

This had huge potential, both for solving problems for run-and-gun shooting – from candid wedding photos to war photography – where the focus point might be missed in the moment, or where adjusting focus might have the photographer miss the moment.

But it also created new creative possibilities. A single shot could produce two completely different photos. Take the wedding photography example, where a photographer might shoot the groom looking back to the bride as she walks down the aisle. Now a single shot could create one photo with the groom’s face in photo, and the bride blurred, and another with the opposite.

Apple has effectively now put a light field camera into a phone.

Sure, it’s artificial, but Portrait mode has grown dramatically more convincing than its early implementation, so I really think this is a massively exciting development.

Tethered shooting and video-to-SSD

I mentioned this earlier this morning:

Apple did have a very nice surprise in store for photographers and videographers: the iPhone 15 now supports tethered shooting to a Mac, for automatic high-speed transfer of photos as they are taken, and for recording video directly to an external SSD.

Tethered shooting is very commonly used in studio photography, not only saving time by eliminating the need to transfer photos at the end of a shoot, but allowing both photographer and client to see photos on a full-sized screen during the shoot.

Shooting video to an external SSD has so far been the preserve of cinema cameras. It is, for example, supported by the BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, and has been a popular reason for some to opt for that over competing models. Shooting to SSD provides access to terabyte levels of storage at affordable prices, and again makes it quicker to move from shoot to edit by simply plugging the SSD into a Mac at the end of a shoot.

I probably won’t use tethered shooting personally, and I’m not sure about shooting to SSD – that all depends on future video products, and the role my iPhone plays in them. But the latter is a very reassuring option to have, as it enabled me to go for the new base storage of 256GB without worrying about whether I’d ever want more for video storage.

Other enhancements

A larger sensor and wider aperture for the telephoto lens ought to make for significant better low-light and Night Mode shots, so I’m definitely looking forward to testing this.

Smart HDR will have limited uses – in that it requires a compatible app to be able to view the extra detail – but again will be interesting to see in action.

So yep, that’s me sold on another iPhone upgrade! I’ll of course follow up with my first impressions when I receive it.

What excites you about the new lineup? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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