Why The iPhone 15 Camera Is A Huge Upgrade
Apple's latest livestream event went down on Tuesday afternoon, featuring the official introduction of the iPhone 15. As always, there was a lot of attention given to how the camera in the new model beats out previous iterations, with the 4K live stream being used to show off exactly what it's capable of.
The iPhone 15's main rear camera features a 48-megapixel sensor, a la the iPhone 14 Pro, complimented by a 12 MP ultra-wide camera. (For comparison, the regular iPhone 14 had a 12 MP main camera.) It boasts a 26mm focal length, 2 µm quad pixel, 100% focus pixels, ƒ/1.6 aperture, and sensor-shift optical image stabilization. It uses what Apple is referring to as a "computational photography" process to take 24 MP photos. Though it has no zoom lens, Apple is claiming that the specific lens arrangement and the computational photography will allow it to achieve the same quality as a 2x optical zoom.
Portrait mode is now automatic
One feature that Apple seemed particularly proud of is that portrait mode is now automatic. Not only is the iPhone's machine learning automatically detecting when a person or pet is in the frame, but the depth of field detection results in photos where you can switch to portrait mode after you take them. Apple has also added focus and depth controls that can be tuned after the fact, allowing you to change who is in focus when there are multiple people in the frame.
All in all, there's a lot more that you can do with your photos after you take them than you had at your fingertips before. Apple has also made improvements to SmartHDR, with brighter photos if you view the photos in the stock Photos app, as well as the ability to focus on both the sky and the subject of the photo at the same time.