The iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR were all announced today. The new models have some great new camera features.
[Apple Will Release HomePod OS 12 September 17th with Phone Calls, Lyric Search, Find My iPhone]
iPhone XS Camera Features
The iPhone XS camera features are great, and it’s nice to see that the iPhone XR have the exact same features.
- 12MP wide-angle camera: Optical image stabilization, new sensor, 1.4um pixels, Focus pixels, f/1.8, 6-element lens
- 12MP telephoto camera: Optical image stabilization, f/2.4, 6-element lens, 2x optical zoom
- True Tone Flash: improved flicker-detect system
- 7MP TrueDepth front camera: new sensor, improved lens
- Smart HDR
- Improved bokeh that is adjustable
Two of my favorite features are the adjustable bokeh when you take a Portrait Mode photo. This is a powerful feature that I don’t think I’ve seen in a smartphone camera before.
The other cool feature is that the iPhone XR camera can also take Portrait Mode photos, even though it doesn’t have a dual-lens camera. Apple has definitely improved its photography algorithms.
Did they fix the design flaw that only allows landscape mode when the camera held in landscape mode and vice versa for portrait. It should be a user setting as it is easier to take a video in portrait mode when you can only hold the camera in one hand.
One thing that has always bothered me about their (and others’) Depth of Field feature (by the way they are totally confusing the idea of Bokeh and Depth of field)*, is that it’s not really Depth of field. They are taking a 100% crisp photo with a very large depth of field, applying a mask to what they think is the foreground image and blurring the background to the same value no matter how far away it is (Because they don’t know how far away it is). It looks good most times, but even in their “amazing” example of the woman resting her head on the table you can see that the blur is totally effecting her shirt sleeve just as much as the background behind her. The Depth of Field adjustment is just a quantity of blur adjustment.
*Bokeh is not just blurred background it is the specific visual result of an out of focus area and the shape of the lens (usually a circle) giving you circular shapes/orbs of highlights and shadows.
Depth of Field is the distance from your focus object (not always the foreground object) that remains in focus. Depending upon the aperture settings this will either reduce quickly and dramatically (small depth of field) or hardly at all (large depth of field).