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 Left is obviously the 16 Pro, right our “outdated” 11 Pro.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??!
Comparing photo abilities of iPhone 11 Pro to an 11 year old camera | MacRumors Forums
How much better is camera vs IPhone 11?
Iphone 11 Pro Max Camera Shaking
Did you happen to mount the device to a motorcycle or other vibrating item?
See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212803
More on reddit.comiPhone 11 Pro Camera App jittery/jumpy zoom
Try it on a subject much farther away.
The shift between sensors is MUCH more noticeable when you are very close to your subject.
Post a video of that please.
More on reddit.comVideos
I’m going to need to replace my iPhone 11 soonish and iPhone 16 seems like a common sense choice (I like to keep a phone for as long as possible so hopefully I keep my iPhone 16 until I replace it with the iPhone 21). My main areas of interest in general is battery life and camera. Now obviously I’ve seen the specs but would love to get some real world opinions on how much better the camera on the 16 actually is?