IPhone 15

Hello all,

I felt that I needed to make a post because I am tired of Apple's deceptive marketing surrounding the camera in the iPhone 15. Apple clearly states in the marketing that the main camera has a 48MP sensor, this is not the case. The phone actually has a 12MP Quad Bayer sensor.

Here is a great explanation of what quad bayer sensors are. Long story short though a 12MP quad bayer sensor does have more photosites (not pixels!) than a normal 12MP camera. However those extra photosites are going towards dynamic range and noise performance, not detail.

You can easily test this yourself by taking two identical pictures, one in the 12MP mode, and one in the 48MP HEIF Max mode. You will quickly see that there is only an extremely small increase in detail. If you do the same test with a real camera, you will notice a massive increase in detail when you zoom in/crop.

I am not hating on the camera in the iPhone 15, it is a good camera, but that does not mean that it is OK for Apple to lie through their teeth about the specs.

I stumbled across this chart comparing iPhone camera sensor sizes and it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come but also how backwards Apple has gone with the 16e.

A sensor the size of the iPhone XS with 4 times more but smaller pixels just seems wrong. And I know it’s a “budget” iPhone and that it does pixel binning, but it makes me wonder how Apple is relying way more on software rather than hardware here.

Anyone else thinking the same thing?