About two years ago I was ready to finally upgrade my old iPhone and the latest at the time was the 15. I bought the 15 Pro expecting to use it for good photography, and couldn’t help but notice that the pictures seemed worse than on my girlfriend‘s 11 Pro. One day we took a picture side-by-side and sure enough, the 11 Pro blew the 15 Pro out of the water in clarity, sharpness, etc. So I downgraded to a normal 15 as I didn’t care about the camera that much anymore and that was that. Well, a few days ago we went into the Apple Store to upgrade her 11 Pro to a 16 Pro, hoping they fixed it. Not even close. I couldn’t stand it and I snapped two side-by-sides to show the staff. Please have a look at the pic. Left is obviously the 16 Pro, right our “outdated” 11 Pro. One of the staff members tried to convince me that it had to do with lens switching but I explained to him that at the same FOV there shouldn’t be such a loss in quality and we basically went back-and-forth at different zoom levels, and the 16 Pro simply could not keep up (it did of course have more zoom, but we’re talking about comparing apples to apples FOV-wise.)

I am just baffled and have been now for years. Apple, the golden child of imaging and digital graphics, lost the photography throne to Samsung and others long ago. (When we want really good photography we use our Galaxy S20 Note Ultra.) Can anybody explain this to me? I had the Apple staff go over certain settings with me, hoping maybe there was something that could improve things, and nothing worked, even forcing 48MP. How/why have they let this happen? How does their 5 year old model beat everything coming out today? WTF??!

Hey everyone

I’ve just bought the iPhone 11 and started exploring its cameras. I made two identical photos on wide and ultra wide cameras and noticed that the photo from the last one is much less detailed than the first one. The files’ sizes are the same — around 3 megabytes, but the objects are less sharp on ultra wide and I can zoom deeper on the wide camera’s photo. Here’re the screenshots of zoomed images: ultra and regular. Here’re the originals: ultra and regular.

I thought the cameras are identical and have the same MP resolution. What’s the reason of this difference?

Hi everyone! I’m new here. So I’ve been interested in getting into photography and am thinking about getting a camera. The thing is that I’ve heard iPhone cameras are actually pretty great so I’m wondering, what kind of camera is equivalent to the camera on my iphone 11 pro max? I was thinking for example about getting a used digital camera but I’ve heard it said that most iPhones have better cameras than any digital camera under $100. So I guess my question is, how much would I have to invest in to get a camera that can outperform my iphone?