iPhone 16 Pro camera: DISAPPOINTING & MISLEADING

[Music] breaking news Apple launched the new iPhone 16 pro pro Max and it's a huge disappointment apple is using misleading marketing to make the cameras seem great Apple wants you to think the iPhone is just as good as a professional camera but it's a lie and I can prove it and I will prove it right after I thank our sponsor Squarespace Squarespace makes gorgeous websites so simple head to squarespace.com / Tony that can get you a free trial no credit card required make a beautiful photography portfolio a video reel a website for your personal project or any business you can sell products take appointments from clients anything you can imagine is possible when you start at squarespace.com Tony Try It Out free when you love it the coupon code Tony will get you 10% off thanks for sponsoring us Squarespace before I get into the misleading stuff let's talk about real improvements they recognize that the ergonomics of smartphones aren't great for photography and took a page out of the Sony experius Playbook they gave it a physical shutter control button that has a few interesting capabilities like at least with a future software update you'll be able to sort of half press to focus and full press to take a picture what US photographers have called Focus recompose you'll also be able to launch the camera by pushing that button take pictures and video once it's open and by sliding your finger along it you'll be able to adjust the exposure comp compensation the virtual aperture the iris to blur the background out or zoom in and out physical controls are always good but a button isn't exactly a huge Innovation like every year much of Apple's marketing is around improvements to the camera but increasingly these improvements are absolutely meaningless and misleading the top one is that the super wide angle lens the 13 mm equivalent lens goes from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels quadrupling the megapixels sounds fantastic that should be revolutionary even my Pro Camera has 50 megapixels so it should be about the same right absolutely wrong and I will prove that to you in just a second they are giving us 4K at 120 frames per second video that's an increase from the current iPhone 15 Pro Max's 4K at 60 frames per second the five times zoom lens from the iPhone 15 Pro Max is now going to be in both the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max prev ly I think you got a three times zoom lens on the lower end 15 Pro and that's a problem because we did a full test on the iPhone 15 Pro three time Zoom versus the five time zoom on the pro Max and the pro three time zoom was much better here's a little clip from a full video to show you why the five time zoom sucks things get interesting at three times that's where Chelsea has a dedicated 9mm lens and my iPhone 15 still has to use the 24mm lens cropped three times Chelsea's iPhone 14 pro Max is really sharp here my iPhone 15 Pro Max looks terrible as we zoom into 4.9 times this gets even worse look at the iPhone 14 pro Max versus the iPhone 15 Pro this is supposed to be an upgrade so the five-time zoom sucks and it sucks that Apple took away the option to get a three-time zoom because that huge gap from a onetime zoom to a five time zoom is way too much to cover with cropping I'll prove that to you in a little bit too here's the part where ter apart Apple's fake marketing but first I want to say I love the iPhone as a camera I appreciate that an American manufacturer has taken back the vast majority of the camera industry and I love my iPhone as a camera I really do I always have it with me it is three okay quality prime lenses that if you know how to use them can produce pretty good results in low light computational photography produces better images than you can get with many traditional cameras it's complet completely waterproof I don't have to worry about it falling into the water or getting ruined when I take a picture it is instantly backed up to the cloud none of my professional cameras can do that it has GPS Cellular Connections and anti- theft capabilities so I don't have to worry about it getting robbed and if I'm in a dangerous place which I sometimes am I leave my professional camera in the room and I take my phone with me and do the best I can with it I can instantly share and stream using these cameras and when I take pictures I can quickly search through to find all pictures of dogs something I can't do with my professional cameras very easily and we do frequently use it even in our professional videos because the quality is often good enough Apple doesn't need to mislead us they need to innovate so now I'm going to show you just how they mislead us with a bunch of side by side first the main lens what we call the 24 mm equivalent lens Apple advertises that and the new super wideangle lens as 48 megapixels so let's take a 48 megap picture with them and compare it to a 48 megap picture from a real camera zoomed back they both look okay but let's zoom in on the focusing chart here looking at them side by side can you see any difference yes if this is 48 megapixels how is this 48 megapixels either the iPhone's camera isn't really 48 megapixels or 48 megapixels doesn't mean anything right but we the consumers tend to think that more megapixels means more image quality that's what we really want right but it is not true especially with the tricks that apple and other smartphone manufacturers are pulling the fact of the matter is the 24 and 13 mm lenses on the iPhone are 12 megapixel sensors 12 megapixels but then they divide each pixel into four a technique they call Quad pixel and that doesn't noticeably improve the amount of detail or the image quality in extensive testing that we've done what it does do is it quadruples the number for the sake of marketing the image on the right is the same width in pixels but it is far sharper so if we were to use megapixels to describe the amount of detail in an image how many megapixels of detail does the iPhone picture have let's divide the resolution by four and compare the iPhone's 48 megapixel picture against a 12 megapixel picture the 12 megapixel picture is still sharper it's still more readable look how the 400 here is is readable and the 400 here is completely illegible so 48 megapixels from an iPhone is worse than 12 megapixels from a real camera how low do we have to go before we find out how much detail is in there let's let's try 6 megapixels here I think we've finally reached parity the legibility of the lines and the numbers on the 6 megapixel image is about the same as the 48 megapixel image from the iPhone Apple is producing images with 6 megapixels of detail packed into a 48 me pixel file they're making a huge file with absolutely no image quality benefit to it I want to make a note I am using Apple's dng format the highest quality raw format some people will say well the heck file maybe that does better so let's compare their DG to the HEC file the DG raw file has much more natural processing while Apple's processing ruins the HEC file the skin tones on the raw file are pretty good the skin tones in the HEC file are terrible they've oversharpened it added way too much contrast she looks 20 years older in the shot taken with the iPhone HEC file so I have to say if you're using an iPhone to take pictures use the DG raw option whenever you can the pictures look much much better but you give up a lot like you give up live photos and they take up a lot more storage space and if you use iCloud like I do that means you're going to be paying more for the rest of these examples I'm using DG because that produces significantly better quality even though it comes with a bunch of drawbacks because I want to give the iPhone every possible benefit besides the fake quad pixel sensor another reason the iPhone can't produce highquality images is the lens the lens is Tiny and flat this is the lens I used to take those sample pictures with and see how much bigger that is high quality lenses have to be huge the resolution you get from an image can be limited by either the megapixels of the sensor or the optical quality of the lens and of course a tiny flat little lens isn't going to produce the same images as a big lens of course now let's take a look at the iPhone's fake two times lens Apple had to include a fake two times lens because that's about 50 mm which we consider normal this is the focal length that most photographers use most often it's extremely important so let's compare their fake two times lens just at 12 megapixels to a real 50mm lens here we are at 50 mm equivalent let's zoom in this is outrageous look how much more detail a real camera has with only 12 megapixels compared to what the iPhone is producing now look Apple's producing a 12 megapixel image with their fake two times zoom lens which makes sense because 48 divided 4 equals 12 but we just determined the 48 megapixel images only had 6 megapixels of detail so really we're taking a 6 megapixel image and dividing that by four and we're ending up with 1 and2 megapixels and that's why real 12 megapixel picture looks so much drastically drastically better than Apple's fake lens all these numbers on the real camera are completely readable you can't even tell that these are letters they're just smears so how much detail do we actually get at just two times Zoom 50 mm let's compare it to a 2.7 megapixel image both these images look bad but the iPhone picture isn't really any better we can see the lines sort of disappear at about the same point as we count the resolution lines here they disappear at about the same point these two images are pretty similar when you're using the two-time zoom you're getting about 3 megapixels of detail and that's not really enough especially for what is probably the most common focal length for photography all the media covering this who's not calling Apple out you are screwing over the photography Community by continuing to repeat Apple's misleading marketing as if it were true let's go a step further let's go to 85 mm the most common focal length for portraits this is 12 megapixels versus 12 megapixels can you see the difference it's ridiculous to even call that iPhone picture 12 megapixels you see you could collect one megapixel of detail and blow it up to a billion megapixels upscaling exists but it doesn't add detail it only wasts storage space and when you make artificially large files guess who profits Apple because you need to buy a phone with more storage space and you need to pay for more iCloud storage space there's no reason for Apple to save a 12 megapixel file when they are cropping down about 2 megapixels of detail so let's compare that 85 mm against a 3 megapixel file from a real 85 mm lens oh my God the 3 megapixel file looks better than Apple's 12 megapixel file that means it's storing four times more detail and giving you worse quality and the fact is the quality continues to get worse with the two new Pro cameras all the way up to 4.9 times when you go to five times now it switches to the five time zoom lens which is better than heavily heavily cropping but because they got rid of that three times zoom lens the quality drops substantially here's a clip from a previous video where I explained exactly why this happens here's a chart for my fellow nerds vertically the Y AIS here is the number of megapixels and horizontally it's the focal length when you zoom from the prime focal lengths the megapixels necessarily drop because the phone is cropping this data it gets from the sensor even though it does not change the image size that's why we see this dip at 20 mm it is cropping from 13 mm when we use the prime lenses at 13 mm 24 mm 77 mm and 120 mm the megapixels are a full 12.2 megapixels all the in between f lengths involve cropping and losing data everything is a tie until 77 mm and then the iPhone 14 pro is way ahead of the iPhone 15 Pro Max which has barely over 1 megapixel of data at that point by the time we get to5 mm the iPhone 15 Pro Max has just a little over half a megapixel of data that is a huge difference and that's why the iPhone 14 pro Max pictures look so much better but lots of you in the comments are saying oh but what about all the pros using iPhone I'm a pro and I use the iPhone all the time it's an incredibly useful tool but that doesn't mean this marketing isn't total BS I saw the weekend video filmed with the iPhone it looks fantastic it's gorgeous but it's a marketing deal nobody would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on that set and probably millions of dollars to get the weekend in the room and then use a stupid iPhone of course you would just rent a real cinema camera for a couple of grand but they did it with an iPhone as a stunt what does that prove does that prove that the iPhone is a proper Cinema Camera no what it proves is that lots of things are more important than the camera like the subject the story The Lighting that video is beautifully directed and that's not to the credit of apple or the iPhone but the director the Director of Photography the talent but the camera is an important tool and it's important to understand what it can and can't do and I hope I've made you realize that Apple's bogus 48 megapixel claims do not produce more detail that cropping to zoom instead of an optical zoom is way way worse and I beg of you to let Apple know that you're onto their BS and apple you can do better you can go back to innovating we need something more than just a new button stop trying to replace professional cameras Canon Nikon Sony red they are not your enemies work with them to produce better images instead of trying to beat them in the comments down below let me know what you think and before you say I'm some apple hater I'm not this is the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro I just ordered the iPhone 16 Pro Max and I'm using the iPhone 15 Pro Max until that comes in I have all the Apple watches the airpod max the airpod pro I'm using Apple carplay I'm an apple Fanboy but I do not tolerate misleading marketing one company that has never misled me that I trust for 10 years now is Squarespace start at squarespace.com Tony and you can set up a free trial for your website just see how great it is how professional your work your images your restaurant your personal project see how professional they look on a proper website that somebody else has to maintain you don't have to worry about the backups or fighting off every attacker that's out there because Square SES space has an incredible team keeping it up and running I absolutely love Squarespace and you will too so start at squarespace.com Tony get your free trial and when you love it the coupon code Tony gets you 10% off thank you Squarespace don't forget to subscribe to see a tutorial on the new iPhone 16 Pro Max and to support the guy who will call out apple on their BS because there's not many of us left that will do that bye