DXOMARK sells test equipment and consulting services for (among others) camera tuning.
Naturally, they won't attack the image quality of a customer who purchased their test equipment and/or consulting service (usually not publicly known who did that), so they often tone down some of their statements when they review a device (and shift the attention to other areas).
Always interesting to check out the scores of DXOMARK competitors in parallel, e.g. VCX[0] which strives for an objective scoring scheme (but didn't test the device yet, indicating that they at least didn't have an early sample)
I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get an interference of the aperture blades and the wide-open bokeh. With a lens that is prone to ring bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect (and an irregular shape at different angles)
Thanks for asking, NuclearPM. It was not actually a question. In informal English a question mark can follow a plain statement, where then it indicates a non-specific uncertainty. In the case above, the sentence could be interpreted generally as: “I didn’t say they were... and I'm not sure what gave impression I did" or "I didn't say they were... I think you misinterpreted."
I would argue against the siblings and say, yes, it's a question; it's a shortening and softening of the rhetorical "But then I didn't say they were, did I?"
It's not due to the aperture blades. It's due to the amount of spherical aberration in the lenses.
Professional camera lenses carefully control this. It's actually one of the only intentional "flaws" added to lens. Technically bokeh with a slight ring on it (on point lights) usually results in a tack sharp lens. You can see this in most macro lenses.
Portrait lenses are sort of the opposite - they want super smooth bokeh (point light sources in the blurred out of focus area will have a nice gradient that is soft and gradually drops off toward the edges). This results in a lens that has slightly less sharpness on the in focus portion. It's not that noticeable though on a great lens.
Most lenses are a balance. When shooting professional cinema many lenses are intentional chosen for their bokeh qualities. "Nervous" bokeh is more on the side of rings and is often found on older Russian and East German glass.
There are two lenses where the amount of spherical aberration is not baked into the lens. They were made by Nikon called "Defocus Control". The 105mm 2.0 DC and slightly older 135mm 2.0 DC both have a second ring that looks another aperture ring but allows adjustability of the spherical aberration from "nervous" to "smooth". They were marketed poorly and misunderstood but are some of the best glass you can get - they test insanely well and have huge flexibility.
> The 105mm 2.0 DC and slightly older 135mm 2.0 DC [...]
I almost never change the defocus control on the 135/2.0 from neutral, yet I believe the lens makes it almost impossible to take a bad portrait. The only reason to keep a DSLR around instead of a mirrorless is that this lens has an old-school camera driven auto-focus, which Nikon's F-to-Z adapters don't support. While manually focusing that lens can be done, the shallow depth of field makes it very challenging for moving subjects.
It's definitely worth messing with. The reason it has a F and R side (with aperture markings) is that a lens will be optimised to either provide ideal bokeh at close or long focus (long focus bokeh being things blurred in the foreground closer to the camera). Try setting it for example to F 2.8 real aperture and then I believe move the DC ring to R 2.8 or 4 and you should get a very pleasant creamy blur. Or for a slightly sharper portrait move to neutral or R 2.0
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
> I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
Ooh yeah I love those weird shapes nearly wide open. I found a lens that had a torx bit shaped aperture the other day, I'll have to fish that out and see what it looks like in an image. Lots of compact cameras have a diamond/square-ish hole, notably the Minox 35 range from what I can recall.
Edit: just saw your update with the photos of the mechanism. Wow that's impressive miniaturisation. The hexagonal shape looks surprisingly good. I wonder what's causing the odd effects in the OP. I have noticed in the past that iPhone cameras produce square specular highlights through tree foliage, so I wonder if it's an extension of that oddity.
Yes that mechanism only has two blades! They are sort of sickle-shaped. (Presumably gave the Soviet cloners a chuckle)
I found myself looking at it when I was considering making a DIY aperture for my DIY lenses. (I've personally settled on swappable Waterhouse stops for now but I might fit an eBay microscope aperture, many of them have loads of blades).
Oh and now I'm going to end up looking on eBay for a Minox 35ML or 35GT again. Seriously, never do this while logged in; Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Haha there's certain camera models that are very prone to that. Some of the Pentacon M42 lenses are worth a look if you want an unholy amount of blades - I have a 135mm f/2.8 sat around that has like 15 blades or something daft.
Coincidentally I think I have a non-working 35GT in my market stall (https://camerasetc.wales), so if you want a project drop me an email as I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. I have too much in my repair backlog and those things are fiddly little bastards at the best of times :D
I too have too much clutter so I will have to turn down your kind offer but I will peruse your sites and I may ping you a note sometime about a particular lens I have been looking for — quite a random cheap old one I regret parting company with. (I'm in Kent but I have a friend in Cardiff and if my wallet does not protest I may pop in on your stall)
Ooh do drop me any odd things you're looking for - I never know what's going to turn up, and I do keep a lookout for anything people ask me about. I have debated trying some sort of online stock listing but I think that might just end in chaos due to the lack of space I have for organised storage and other people moving my stuff around.
That reminds me that I need to do a new update post, whoops. I've had an absolute buttload of Pentax K mount gear the past couple of months, which is quite annoying as I don't have that many customers that shoot it. I'll have to big up the Pentax cameras a bit more haha.
Do swing by if you're ever in town when the market's open! I've always got lots of fun cheap stuff kicking about, and a bin of broken shit if you need parts :D
> Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Because they are a nightmare to own. So lovely when they work but so frustrating because you keep readjusting the shutter mechanism with those tiny screws and you end up wasting so many rolls (and pictures) in the process.
I own a 35GT, barely use it but wouldn't sell it because I have too much empathy. It would feel like receiving money to spell a malediction on someone.
Following on for clarity, this is why the Duo lacks a dynamic aperture. Seems they must have been quite squeezed for space.l indeed.
Even on the 18 Pro Max the 8x zoom of the telephoto lens is just the 4x using the same 12 MP crop of the 48 MP sensor to "double" the 4x optical zoom as the last generation. I hope we can get some level of optical zoom on a future Duo.
Soap bubble bokeh comes from overcorrected SA. Onion rings and related brightness anomalies/unevenness in bokeh are mostly the result of molded aspheric lenses. Stopping slightly down has not significantly impacted bokeh (apart from apodized lenses) since rounded aperture blades have been invented about fifty years ago.
The iPhone 18 aperture does not have rounded blades (except the tip). Six hooked blades, very truncated hexagon aperture (perhaps exactly a regular dodecagon, it’s a little difficult to tell from the promo images)
> I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh
PetaPixel reviewed the bokeh, and called it "meh" and "not very nice". [1]
A lot of the iPhone reviews are very rushed in order to have a review ready by the time the embargo is lifted. I think the PetaPixel review is quite thorough given the limited amount of time they had to actually use it.
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh. And I say that as someone that shoots my 50mm 1.2 wide open.
Previously the blur on iPhone was all software, apparently. I've set mine to do wide open with no bokeh, and i'll put it in after.
But to be honest, the iPhone is the camera I have on me, so the limits are acceptable. Can I force focus it? No. Can I get the glow? No. But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
I remeber photographers talking about X has "not very nice bokeh" probably since I met a first photographer when phones were monochrome and had no camera. No one beside photographer cared then, no one will care today.
To most people its just blur and they don't care that it is not just blur.
If your assertion was true, it logically leads to "camera quality doesn't matter man, only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures"
There are details, all of these are details; but saying that "iphone5-level-cameras are good enough form most people" is both true (obviously it sold and millions were satisfied with it) and false (most people would notice today that iphone5s take worse photos than latest-gen). All the details add up to image quality that _is_ noticeable even to the laymen.
> But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
Well, yeah. f1.2 is a nice gimmick but opening up so wide rarely translates into better photos. Don't get me wrong - you can get some beautiful portraits with that lens. But in practice, my 24-70 f2.8 zoom lens gets way more use than a 50mm prime.
There's a reason high end phones have multiple cameras on them. It's because not every photo wants to be taken at the same focal length.
I'd much rather a mirrorless camera with a 24-70 than an iphone. A mirrorless camera with just a 50mm prime will take some beautiful photos. And some photos you won't be able to capture at all.
Zoom in on the tree leaves, it's very visible on those. They appear as green rings, slightly lighter on the edge, giving it the appearance of a ring. You can also see it very clearly in the spots of sky between the leaves, they appear grey with an almost white outline.
Specular light sources always like ornamental balls in out of focus areas. What's wrong with it here is they are much brighter along the outside than the middle, and they have a funny shield like shape.
That said, I can't see this with the image open filling my 27" monitor, I can only see it zooming in. Perhaps if you are printing a wall sized photo, use a real camera.
Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
Youtuber Marques Brownlee did this (as a short). It's actually not so noticeable, it's only once you get to the very oldest phones that it's visibly worse.
the difference will be in things like low-light, telephoto lenses, video capability, HDR, and lots of other things that don't show up in most photos (including that one)
It'd be much better if this test was done in low light. The tiny sensors in iphones work fine when there's plenty of light around. The real test is how well they do when the you aren't sitting in the sun.
The caption on the close up says: “Details preserved on both face, face in the back in focus”. But it seems to me that a lot of detail is actually missing! On the later pictures you see a lot of skin “imperfections”, which looks much better. The 18 pro picture is way too smooth!
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
For mobile devices they unfortunately do a much less technical analysis compared to "real" cameras and lenses. Or they just don't publish those parts. It's really unfortunate
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
This is a question for the sake of curiousness; the article writer shot a couple of pictures of young black kids. I can't find any mention in the article, but is this just coincidence or is this commonly done becauses the darker skin is hard to shoot correctly?
It's relatively common and mostly a problem of exposure, especially in group photos. In general you want higher exposure for darker skin tones so that the camera resolves more detail, but at the same time you don't want the background overexposed.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
Android doesn’t have a single decent calendar app. The apps that do exist and are cross platform are _almost always_ a worse version of the iOS app. I tried making the switch to Graphene and even after giving in and using the Play store to find apps, it was just impossible.
The launchers were fine, but the app experience being abysmal just made Android a non-starter. I don’t understand how people don’t see this.
RCS didn’t even work as well as it does on iPhone.
And this isn’t a walled garden comparison - I don’t use iCloud or any Apple services aside from iMessage (for people who don’t have signal).
Try using a self-hosted calendar on Android - absolutely impossible if you have any expectation of it being usable. And no, an unreliable third party app that promises to sync in the background does not count, mostly because it doesn’t work well. iCalendar works. You should not need to buy Business Calendar 2 to get a worse version of what iPhone users get for free.
There are a half dozen apps at least I could tell a similar story about.
I disagree strongly with "iCalendar works". Basic sync to Google Calendar causes weird artefacts and notifications (like getting event invites for events that are already accepted).
I also strongly dislike the iOS Calendar UI, though that's possibly also because of iOS itself being rather unintuitive. Floating buttons in four corners of the screen just isn't very clear. In my opinion Google Calendar, even on iOS, is much better. More reliable on iOS too, but Google's app syncing better with Google's servers isn't really a good comparison.
I have no problem syncing with DAVx5 across various iCal sources on my phone. iOS seems pretty funky about its protocol requirements (and if it fails to understand the protocol, it's hard to tell why it failed). Apple practically invented the protocol, they should offer some kind of explanation of why it's not working.
That said, I do think Google should invest more into getting third party calendar support into their GCalendar apps. I don't want to need a third party app even if the app works fine, it should be part of the standard calendar app.
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
Always being five years behind everyone and doing its own boneheaded decisions that they inevitably have to walk back does tend to make Apple the Aztec in this case.
Mockery aside: it's all the same. They're all good enough for portraits where all you want is some depth of field & contrast, they're all good enough for landscapes where they capture colors pretty well, and they're all catastrophic past 5x zoom. You can take the top 10 of DXOMark (hell, the top 20) and you won't realistically find a difference unless you're pixel peeping. Which, we all know your phone pictures are just being sent compressed over Whatsapp, it doesn't matter. If you want camera quality pictures, get a camera. Even a 15 year old shitty Canon will take better pictures than the 18 Pro.
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
For instance th Xiaomi Ultra 17's main camera is faulted for having shallow depth of field or "autofocus decision errors", which I assume just means the auto selected subject wasn't the person straight in front of the camera ? [0]
These tests seem to be about versatility and predictability more than sheer performance.
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
Apple's cameras always look overprocessed to me. Not to the extent that some Chinese smartphone manufacturers replace your skin, but the general vibe of Apple's pictures is just off.
Some people really like that style, though. I think it's a matter of preference, and it seems like the people who like that style are exactly who Apple is optimizing their image algorithms for.
This particular iteration seems to increase the hallucinations a bit more than previous models, though. Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.
>Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.
This is just because the eye without eyelashes is on the side of her face that's in shadow. That means there's less contrast between the black of the eyelash and her skin tone (which is darker in the shadow area), and so the denoising algorithm wipes out the lash. All of this image processing happens way too fast on an iPhone for anything deserving the label of 'AI' to be involved. People are just going nuts over the unsurprising artefacts of a completely standard image processing pipeline.
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
I wonder what percentage of pixels is actually from the camera's sensor vs made up / somewhat inspired by the data from the sensor. Maybe I'm too old for this, but I can't imagine people wanting their photos to look like this.
don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg
No need for image gen to get this kind of problem; to me that skin look just reads as really aggressive denoising. And there is no escaping physics, a tiny high-res sensor will need a whole lot of denoising for this really challenging scene (meh lighting, strong backlight; the dark, shiny skin is probably also an issue but I’ve no experience there).
The only surprising part is how good the results are: there is no leftover color noise that I can see, the window doesn’t have any color fringing, the high-frequency detail of the table setting and the drapes hasn’t been destroyed, the small backlit hairs on the sides of the face of the girl in front haven’t been smeared over oil-painting style. It’s strange how one eyebrow (in the back) got completely obliterated while the other looks completely fine, and it’s even stranger how the texture of the collar (in front) is basically perfect on the left where it’s unobstructed but basically destroyed on the right where some hair escaping from the braids was in front of it, so perhaps there is some image-gen-adjacent stuff going on here.
The skin looks bad, don’t get me wrong. But the degree of badness seems fair for the situation, and as a whole the result has no business looking as good as it does to my 2016-camera-trained eye.
(Also, don’t photograph people with a wide-angle lens from up close, it’s always freaky at best—like here—and ugly at worst. Just don’t.)
The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.
> You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred
Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos.
Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
You take a picture of your wife with your phone. You show it to a coworker. They tell you that your wife looks like a reptile wearing a rubber face mask.
Your reaction is?
a. “Yeah, the slight over processing definitely turned my wife into a lizard person.”
I’m not a big fan of the bokeh on smartphone cameras. The depth of field isn’t shallow enough to really isolate the subject, yet it’s shallow enough to make background details slightly blurry. As someone who uses a DSLR, I don’t find the nisen bokeh particularly pleasing either. If I were using an iPhone 18 Pro, I’d probably keep it at around f4 for a deeper dof most of the time rather than shooting wide open.
I’m not convinced that this is a particularly scientific or rigorous test of the cameras! Seems rather lacking in control variables, documented processes, actual measurements etc.
That is not relevant. The conclusion of the review on the website is being dismissed because of some other qualities of the website that have no bearing on the quality of the review being performed.
> Judging some factors surrounding the content is quickly done, and generally a good approximation for the quality of the content itself.
How obnoxious is the website, how tasteful is the design? Is the copyright year in the footer up-to-date (terrible signal if the year is wrong)?
> A crass analogy, but I'll not take health advice from someone with brown stains on their pants either.
The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.
I saw some tests on it and it’s kind of a whatever feature. The iPhone depth of field is still far too deep even wide open. So the difference stopped down is kind of meaningless.
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
> Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture
This is like saying most users will never adjust the shutter speed. Of course they won't, because the software automatically adjusts it, just like it does on any traditional camera. For the aperture capable lens, the software adjusts the aperture automatically depending upon light and/or depth of field requirements of a scene.
And yes, photographs are still spectacularly important.
But...I don't get it regardless. You know that video also uses apertures on every such equipped device, right? Better depth of field if the environment allows it is a good thing.
> Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point
I feel like people are just saying silly bullshit now. Apple has made video a core part of their product reveals for years now. And current iPhones take outrageously good videos.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
The 18 Pro enables 'pro' features in the default camera app that finally allows you to set the white balance, shutter speed, aperture, but not the ISO.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
They Huawei currently are the best when it comes to still pictures, it is the one area/feature they can win, nothing wrong with that. Where Apple wins is in the total hardware and software package, which is why they are better at the video end of the picture in comparison to their competition.
Samsung in the past has also held that distinction, being able to take very good still pictures, but they too fell down when it came to hardware and software, particularly when you start adding in video performance, which requires better software/hardware chops. Nothing is gonna beat Apple chip hardware right now.
> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays
As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.
I still think there is a line in the sand between post processing which is mostly about fixing the exposure/noise, and straight up AI up scaling which hallucinates details.
And I fear the more tech reviewers do these pixel peeping side by side comparisons between phones, the greater the incentive to cheat.
The really problem of iPhone camera is not these benchmark things. The problem is that the photo captured by the “Modern iPhone” simply does not look nice , let say, compared to iPhone 4S.
I think we're fighting against the modern world here. My 4S did and still does take the last great iPhone photos, before the processing pipeline ruined it for me, with over-sharpening, smeared noise-reduction and color flattening.
Thankfully we have access to raw DNGs in phones after the 4S, so we can create our own image processing pipeline.
But for "out of the camera" JPGs, the 4S is still supreme.
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background.
Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
Always worth to note:
DXOMARK sells test equipment and consulting services for (among others) camera tuning.
Naturally, they won't attack the image quality of a customer who purchased their test equipment and/or consulting service (usually not publicly known who did that), so they often tone down some of their statements when they review a device (and shift the attention to other areas).
Always interesting to check out the scores of DXOMARK competitors in parallel, e.g. VCX[0] which strives for an objective scoring scheme (but didn't test the device yet, indicating that they at least didn't have an early sample)
[0] https://vcx-forum.org/score/phonecam-2025
I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
Edit: e.g. the tree in one of the images in the page: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh, it's the cause of polygonal stopped-down bokeh.
Heavily ringed bokeh just comes from the optics.
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get an interference of the aperture blades and the wide-open bokeh. With a lens that is prone to ring bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect (and an irregular shape at different angles)
> But then I didn't say they were?
Is that a question?
English be like this man. It's everything all-in-one. Fascinating language I tells you. Much like all other languages which be fascinating.
Thanks for asking, NuclearPM. It was not actually a question. In informal English a question mark can follow a plain statement, where then it indicates a non-specific uncertainty. In the case above, the sentence could be interpreted generally as: “I didn’t say they were... and I'm not sure what gave impression I did" or "I didn't say they were... I think you misinterpreted."
Does that make sense?
I would argue against the siblings and say, yes, it's a question; it's a shortening and softening of the rhetorical "But then I didn't say they were, did I?"
I fucking love how the fact that English is totally, totally, literally non prescriptive breaks engineering type people’s brains.
Perfectly fine use of colloquial commenting?
Yes.
Against the ‘rule’ you were taught in primary school English? Also yes.
That’s why English is so interesting.
> Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
Why? Where can I read/learn more about this?
It's not due to the aperture blades. It's due to the amount of spherical aberration in the lenses.
Professional camera lenses carefully control this. It's actually one of the only intentional "flaws" added to lens. Technically bokeh with a slight ring on it (on point lights) usually results in a tack sharp lens. You can see this in most macro lenses.
Portrait lenses are sort of the opposite - they want super smooth bokeh (point light sources in the blurred out of focus area will have a nice gradient that is soft and gradually drops off toward the edges). This results in a lens that has slightly less sharpness on the in focus portion. It's not that noticeable though on a great lens.
Most lenses are a balance. When shooting professional cinema many lenses are intentional chosen for their bokeh qualities. "Nervous" bokeh is more on the side of rings and is often found on older Russian and East German glass.
There are two lenses where the amount of spherical aberration is not baked into the lens. They were made by Nikon called "Defocus Control". The 105mm 2.0 DC and slightly older 135mm 2.0 DC both have a second ring that looks another aperture ring but allows adjustability of the spherical aberration from "nervous" to "smooth". They were marketed poorly and misunderstood but are some of the best glass you can get - they test insanely well and have huge flexibility.
> The 105mm 2.0 DC and slightly older 135mm 2.0 DC [...]
I almost never change the defocus control on the 135/2.0 from neutral, yet I believe the lens makes it almost impossible to take a bad portrait. The only reason to keep a DSLR around instead of a mirrorless is that this lens has an old-school camera driven auto-focus, which Nikon's F-to-Z adapters don't support. While manually focusing that lens can be done, the shallow depth of field makes it very challenging for moving subjects.
It's definitely worth messing with. The reason it has a F and R side (with aperture markings) is that a lens will be optimised to either provide ideal bokeh at close or long focus (long focus bokeh being things blurred in the foreground closer to the camera). Try setting it for example to F 2.8 real aperture and then I believe move the DC ring to R 2.8 or 4 and you should get a very pleasant creamy blur. Or for a slightly sharper portrait move to neutral or R 2.0
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
> I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
Not a diagram but one closeup photo:
https://petapixel.com/2026/09/19/apple-explains-why-the-ipho...
and an animation:
https://petapixel.com/2026/09/09/iphone-18-pro-has-apples-fa...
Six blades with a slightly rounded hook in them by the look of it. Very noticeable sun stars at f/1.8, nice looking results at f/2.8.
Absolutely insane mechanical challenge and assembly challenge.
Ooh yeah I love those weird shapes nearly wide open. I found a lens that had a torx bit shaped aperture the other day, I'll have to fish that out and see what it looks like in an image. Lots of compact cameras have a diamond/square-ish hole, notably the Minox 35 range from what I can recall.
Edit: just saw your update with the photos of the mechanism. Wow that's impressive miniaturisation. The hexagonal shape looks surprisingly good. I wonder what's causing the odd effects in the OP. I have noticed in the past that iPhone cameras produce square specular highlights through tree foliage, so I wonder if it's an extension of that oddity.
Yes that mechanism only has two blades! They are sort of sickle-shaped. (Presumably gave the Soviet cloners a chuckle)
I found myself looking at it when I was considering making a DIY aperture for my DIY lenses. (I've personally settled on swappable Waterhouse stops for now but I might fit an eBay microscope aperture, many of them have loads of blades).
Oh and now I'm going to end up looking on eBay for a Minox 35ML or 35GT again. Seriously, never do this while logged in; Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Haha there's certain camera models that are very prone to that. Some of the Pentacon M42 lenses are worth a look if you want an unholy amount of blades - I have a 135mm f/2.8 sat around that has like 15 blades or something daft.
Coincidentally I think I have a non-working 35GT in my market stall (https://camerasetc.wales), so if you want a project drop me an email as I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. I have too much in my repair backlog and those things are fiddly little bastards at the best of times :D
Oh I think I have seen your website before!
I too have too much clutter so I will have to turn down your kind offer but I will peruse your sites and I may ping you a note sometime about a particular lens I have been looking for — quite a random cheap old one I regret parting company with. (I'm in Kent but I have a friend in Cardiff and if my wallet does not protest I may pop in on your stall)
Ooh do drop me any odd things you're looking for - I never know what's going to turn up, and I do keep a lookout for anything people ask me about. I have debated trying some sort of online stock listing but I think that might just end in chaos due to the lack of space I have for organised storage and other people moving my stuff around.
That reminds me that I need to do a new update post, whoops. I've had an absolute buttload of Pentax K mount gear the past couple of months, which is quite annoying as I don't have that many customers that shoot it. I'll have to big up the Pentax cameras a bit more haha.
Do swing by if you're ever in town when the market's open! I've always got lots of fun cheap stuff kicking about, and a bin of broken shit if you need parts :D
> Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Because they are a nightmare to own. So lovely when they work but so frustrating because you keep readjusting the shutter mechanism with those tiny screws and you end up wasting so many rolls (and pictures) in the process.
I own a 35GT, barely use it but wouldn't sell it because I have too much empathy. It would feel like receiving money to spell a malediction on someone.
An aside re: telephoto lens: Duo doesn't have one! It creates the effect of a 2x lens by enlarging the unmagnified image.
The 18 Pro does this too for 1x -> 2x. Same as the iPhone Air, as well.
Following on for clarity, this is why the Duo lacks a dynamic aperture. Seems they must have been quite squeezed for space.l indeed.
Even on the 18 Pro Max the 8x zoom of the telephoto lens is just the 4x using the same 12 MP crop of the 48 MP sensor to "double" the 4x optical zoom as the last generation. I hope we can get some level of optical zoom on a future Duo.
Soap bubble bokeh comes from overcorrected SA. Onion rings and related brightness anomalies/unevenness in bokeh are mostly the result of molded aspheric lenses. Stopping slightly down has not significantly impacted bokeh (apart from apodized lenses) since rounded aperture blades have been invented about fifty years ago.
The iPhone 18 aperture does not have rounded blades (except the tip). Six hooked blades, very truncated hexagon aperture (perhaps exactly a regular dodecagon, it’s a little difficult to tell from the promo images)
I’m having a very hard time telling the blur of the trees apart between the iPhone 18 picture and the iPhone 17 picture of the same subject also posted in the article available here: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...
> I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh
PetaPixel reviewed the bokeh, and called it "meh" and "not very nice". [1]
A lot of the iPhone reviews are very rushed in order to have a review ready by the time the embargo is lifted. I think the PetaPixel review is quite thorough given the limited amount of time they had to actually use it.
[1] https://youtu.be/XYH9RPdRfGs?si=gypqOkTU6dOOv19d&t=1714
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh. And I say that as someone that shoots my 50mm 1.2 wide open.
Previously the blur on iPhone was all software, apparently. I've set mine to do wide open with no bokeh, and i'll put it in after.
But to be honest, the iPhone is the camera I have on me, so the limits are acceptable. Can I force focus it? No. Can I get the glow? No. But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
That assertion is not true at all and your comment overall just reeks of Apple apologism.
The average user may not understand the technical details of bokeh but they will certainly have an opinion on what is pleasing to the eye.
I remeber photographers talking about X has "not very nice bokeh" probably since I met a first photographer when phones were monochrome and had no camera. No one beside photographer cared then, no one will care today.
To most people its just blur and they don't care that it is not just blur.
If your assertion was true, it logically leads to "camera quality doesn't matter man, only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures"
There are details, all of these are details; but saying that "iphone5-level-cameras are good enough form most people" is both true (obviously it sold and millions were satisfied with it) and false (most people would notice today that iphone5s take worse photos than latest-gen). All the details add up to image quality that _is_ noticeable even to the laymen.
Even if they don't care about bokeh per se, they can still find pictures with really bad bokeh to be ugly.
Don’t forget that bokeh doesn’t mean “blur”. Bokeh is about the quality of light in the blur.
You can’t have bokeh without blur but you can have blur without bokeh.
> But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
Well, yeah. f1.2 is a nice gimmick but opening up so wide rarely translates into better photos. Don't get me wrong - you can get some beautiful portraits with that lens. But in practice, my 24-70 f2.8 zoom lens gets way more use than a 50mm prime.
There's a reason high end phones have multiple cameras on them. It's because not every photo wants to be taken at the same focal length.
I'd much rather a mirrorless camera with a 24-70 than an iphone. A mirrorless camera with just a 50mm prime will take some beautiful photos. And some photos you won't be able to capture at all.
> Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh.
I mean, consumers would probably just know it as "nice and pleasing blurred background", versus "this blurred background isn't as nice".
> Can I force focus it?
Yes. There are many camera apps with manual focus. Just not the default app.
Ring shapes on this image? I’m a not a professional and I don’t see them.
Zoom in on the tree leaves, it's very visible on those. They appear as green rings, slightly lighter on the edge, giving it the appearance of a ring. You can also see it very clearly in the spots of sky between the leaves, they appear grey with an almost white outline.
Zoom in on the large tree in the background. It looks as if it has ornamental balls hanging off it.
Specular light sources always like ornamental balls in out of focus areas. What's wrong with it here is they are much brighter along the outside than the middle, and they have a funny shield like shape.
That said, I can't see this with the image open filling my 27" monitor, I can only see it zooming in. Perhaps if you are printing a wall sized photo, use a real camera.
A good video from a pro going through why someone might deliberately choose characteristics like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0zH7J_Vmg4 (4:47)
Reminds of vintage Meyer-Gorlitz or Zeiss Planar. I'm kinda into it.
I've seen similar results from images I've taken using quality lenses but overly aggressive develop settings.
Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
Youtuber Marques Brownlee did this (as a short). It's actually not so noticeable, it's only once you get to the very oldest phones that it's visibly worse.
the difference will be in things like low-light, telephoto lenses, video capability, HDR, and lots of other things that don't show up in most photos (including that one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jru9Gsz3kJY
It'd be much better if this test was done in low light. The tiny sensors in iphones work fine when there's plenty of light around. The real test is how well they do when the you aren't sitting in the sun.
Indeed, I found the oil-painting effect really rough on certain year iphones in low light/when using one of the zoom lenses.
Only iPhone 4 sticks out, 1 through 17 are all fine.
Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?
> someone should assemble
Did you miss your parent comment's sarcasm?
Comparing that 17 vs 18 photo id say it’s less a case of detail preserved and more heavy AI post processing.
That closeup zoom 18 eye shot has that classic AI smooth skin look AI influencers all have.
The caption on the close up says: “Details preserved on both face, face in the back in focus”. But it seems to me that a lot of detail is actually missing! On the later pictures you see a lot of skin “imperfections”, which looks much better. The 18 pro picture is way too smooth!
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
I was wondering about that too, it seems like it's partly in this test report:
https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AppleiPho...
and then more context, especially for the less objective categories, in this test protocol description:
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-camera-image-quality-test...
It was a little annoying to find (About Us > How We Test) but not awful I suppose.
For mobile devices they unfortunately do a much less technical analysis compared to "real" cameras and lenses. Or they just don't publish those parts. It's really unfortunate
DXOMARK sells test equipment, technical report and consulting service.
I am quite sure they have those analysis behind a paywall.
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
This article is doing comparisons with the same subjects and lighting…
No.
The site IS the one calculated score and calming marketing. I am not sure what you are referring:
- the studio photos are not provided
- those seemingly same images have slightly different angle what is actually a huge difference, AND only for 2-3 phones, not for all
PS: e.g. different clouds on the portrait example: huge dynamic difference
James Hetfield used to do a lot of portraits with lightning, what with the band logo and all: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/james-hetfield-ride-the-...
But recently he seems to prefer fire or stadium audiences in the background.
This is a question for the sake of curiousness; the article writer shot a couple of pictures of young black kids. I can't find any mention in the article, but is this just coincidence or is this commonly done becauses the darker skin is hard to shoot correctly?
It's relatively common and mostly a problem of exposure, especially in group photos. In general you want higher exposure for darker skin tones so that the camera resolves more detail, but at the same time you don't want the background overexposed.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
> although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
I use GrapheneOS for my own phone and have always been forced into iPhones at work.
iOS, after 12 years of use, is still so terrible that I can't just get over it.
I open my MacBook and will do whatever needs to be done from there.
I should probably get an iPhone for private use too though. It would surely stop me from being on my phone more than I'd like to.
Android doesn’t have a single decent calendar app. The apps that do exist and are cross platform are _almost always_ a worse version of the iOS app. I tried making the switch to Graphene and even after giving in and using the Play store to find apps, it was just impossible.
The launchers were fine, but the app experience being abysmal just made Android a non-starter. I don’t understand how people don’t see this.
RCS didn’t even work as well as it does on iPhone.
And this isn’t a walled garden comparison - I don’t use iCloud or any Apple services aside from iMessage (for people who don’t have signal).
Try using a self-hosted calendar on Android - absolutely impossible if you have any expectation of it being usable. And no, an unreliable third party app that promises to sync in the background does not count, mostly because it doesn’t work well. iCalendar works. You should not need to buy Business Calendar 2 to get a worse version of what iPhone users get for free.
There are a half dozen apps at least I could tell a similar story about.
I disagree strongly with "iCalendar works". Basic sync to Google Calendar causes weird artefacts and notifications (like getting event invites for events that are already accepted).
I also strongly dislike the iOS Calendar UI, though that's possibly also because of iOS itself being rather unintuitive. Floating buttons in four corners of the screen just isn't very clear. In my opinion Google Calendar, even on iOS, is much better. More reliable on iOS too, but Google's app syncing better with Google's servers isn't really a good comparison.
I have no problem syncing with DAVx5 across various iCal sources on my phone. iOS seems pretty funky about its protocol requirements (and if it fails to understand the protocol, it's hard to tell why it failed). Apple practically invented the protocol, they should offer some kind of explanation of why it's not working.
That said, I do think Google should invest more into getting third party calendar support into their GCalendar apps. I don't want to need a third party app even if the app works fine, it should be part of the standard calendar app.
That’s harsh - the Aztek was not that bad …
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
I drove an Aztek once and it felt fast enough for regular city driving. Why anyone would _need_ a faster car is beyond me.
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
I can understand you disliking an OS or vendor after getting used to another one, but there's no 911-Aztec comparison that makes sense here.
You're confusing a personal preference for a fact.
Always being five years behind everyone and doing its own boneheaded decisions that they inevitably have to walk back does tend to make Apple the Aztec in this case.
Mockery aside: it's all the same. They're all good enough for portraits where all you want is some depth of field & contrast, they're all good enough for landscapes where they capture colors pretty well, and they're all catastrophic past 5x zoom. You can take the top 10 of DXOMark (hell, the top 20) and you won't realistically find a difference unless you're pixel peeping. Which, we all know your phone pictures are just being sent compressed over Whatsapp, it doesn't matter. If you want camera quality pictures, get a camera. Even a 15 year old shitty Canon will take better pictures than the 18 Pro.
A little hard to interpret as the Huawei pictures are not cropped to the same frame. When zooming in the difference is less striking.
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
It seems that in their ranking currently only the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is ahead?
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
Wow, with a lens that big on a smartphone I'd certainly hope it was fantastic: https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/Huawei/Pura-80-Ultra
Even more extreme looking:
* https://www.urbanmag-online.com/marques-brownlee-the-worlds-...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2024/07/18/vivo-x1...
Indeed, Huawei has very aggressive "AI" post-processing
The lens is big but the phone is still the same size.
The criteria can be pretty weird.
For instance th Xiaomi Ultra 17's main camera is faulted for having shallow depth of field or "autofocus decision errors", which I assume just means the auto selected subject wasn't the person straight in front of the camera ? [0]
These tests seem to be about versatility and predictability more than sheer performance.
[0] https://www.dxomark.com/xiaomi-17-ultra-camera-test/
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
ProRes is great but my many years old LG V60 will shoot real 8K video
Wouldn’t that comparison be quite a bit closer vs the 17 Pro? I thought that was a decent camera upgrade year but I can’t keep track.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
Which sensor would that be? I think Sony's?
until the "denoiser" starts to hallucinate
At least it doesn't detect moon shaped objects and impose a static image of the moon on top of it
> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_...
Oh god that plasticization of the faces is absolutely horrifying. Like a bad image gen AI from 2022. Or reptilians wearing cheap rubber masks.
Edit: what's with the downvotes?
Apple's cameras always look overprocessed to me. Not to the extent that some Chinese smartphone manufacturers replace your skin, but the general vibe of Apple's pictures is just off.
Some people really like that style, though. I think it's a matter of preference, and it seems like the people who like that style are exactly who Apple is optimizing their image algorithms for.
This particular iteration seems to increase the hallucinations a bit more than previous models, though. Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.
>Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.
This is just because the eye without eyelashes is on the side of her face that's in shadow. That means there's less contrast between the black of the eyelash and her skin tone (which is darker in the shadow area), and so the denoising algorithm wipes out the lash. All of this image processing happens way too fast on an iPhone for anything deserving the label of 'AI' to be involved. People are just going nuts over the unsurprising artefacts of a completely standard image processing pipeline.
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
Look at one eye has lashes and the other doesn't! It's just a low-quality AI "denoise+sharpen" filter.
Thank you, that is a nice simple concrete example of AI-ification in the photo.
That's just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking and has been around since decades.
I wonder what percentage of pixels is actually from the camera's sensor vs made up / somewhat inspired by the data from the sensor. Maybe I'm too old for this, but I can't imagine people wanting their photos to look like this.
don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg
No need for image gen to get this kind of problem; to me that skin look just reads as really aggressive denoising. And there is no escaping physics, a tiny high-res sensor will need a whole lot of denoising for this really challenging scene (meh lighting, strong backlight; the dark, shiny skin is probably also an issue but I’ve no experience there).
The only surprising part is how good the results are: there is no leftover color noise that I can see, the window doesn’t have any color fringing, the high-frequency detail of the table setting and the drapes hasn’t been destroyed, the small backlit hairs on the sides of the face of the girl in front haven’t been smeared over oil-painting style. It’s strange how one eyebrow (in the back) got completely obliterated while the other looks completely fine, and it’s even stranger how the texture of the collar (in front) is basically perfect on the left where it’s unobstructed but basically destroyed on the right where some hair escaping from the braids was in front of it, so perhaps there is some image-gen-adjacent stuff going on here.
The skin looks bad, don’t get me wrong. But the degree of badness seems fair for the situation, and as a whole the result has no business looking as good as it does to my 2016-camera-trained eye.
(Also, don’t photograph people with a wide-angle lens from up close, it’s always freaky at best—like here—and ugly at worst. Just don’t.)
Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.
The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
The woman in the background is slightly out of focus. It's a great look for most of us.
Compare against the comparison photos. They're there for a reason.
> what's with the downvotes?
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
> What's insulting about overprocessed photos?
This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.
> You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred
Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos.
Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
> It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.
It's very hard to understand. It doesn't make sense that a criticism of the camera would be an insult to the subjects of the photo.
The criticism is that the image isn't an accurate representation of the subjects. If B is bad, and B != A, it doesn't follow that A is bad.
You take a picture of your wife with your phone. You show it to a coworker. They tell you that your wife looks like a reptile wearing a rubber face mask.
Your reaction is?
a. “Yeah, the slight over processing definitely turned my wife into a lizard person.”
b. “Fuck you.”
I would be insulted. My wife is a Grey. She permanently morphed out of reptilian form 222 years ago.
Somewhat smoothed? On the model at the back? Her hair has detail to it, but name one clearly defined facial feature on her face.
I’m not a big fan of the bokeh on smartphone cameras. The depth of field isn’t shallow enough to really isolate the subject, yet it’s shallow enough to make background details slightly blurry. As someone who uses a DSLR, I don’t find the nisen bokeh particularly pleasing either. If I were using an iPhone 18 Pro, I’d probably keep it at around f4 for a deeper dof most of the time rather than shooting wide open.
I'm completely blown away at what they can do within about 10mm.
The site is currently down (for me, at least):
https://web.archive.org/web/20260920202324/https://www.dxoma...
I’m not convinced that this is a particularly scientific or rigorous test of the cameras! Seems rather lacking in control variables, documented processes, actual measurements etc.
They have lots more data in their paid report.
Dxomark sells test tools and reports
Zooming in on a clock 4-500yds away and expecting a fully crisp image seems somewhat of a useless benchmark.
I'm a sniper so this feature is mission-critical to me
Do you take out a lot of clocks? ;)
I’ll pass on the opinion of a website that has not only a cookie banner, but a stupid modal.
Ad hominem. Very low effort and maturity of thought.
a website is not a person. low effort comment and poor correctness
> a website is not a person.
That is not relevant. The conclusion of the review on the website is being dismissed because of some other qualities of the website that have no bearing on the quality of the review being performed.
Yes, it does.
To judge the quality of their findings properly you'd have to perform the same research yourself.
Judging some factors surrounding the content is quickly done, and generally a good approximation for the quality of the content itself.
How obnoxious is the website, how tasteful is the design? Is the copyright year in the footer up-to-date (terrible signal if the year is wrong)?
A crass analogy, but I'll not take health advice from someone with brown stains on their pants either.
> Judging some factors surrounding the content is quickly done, and generally a good approximation for the quality of the content itself. How obnoxious is the website, how tasteful is the design? Is the copyright year in the footer up-to-date (terrible signal if the year is wrong)?
> A crass analogy, but I'll not take health advice from someone with brown stains on their pants either.
These are literally ad hominems.
it tells something that the word "aperture" is only mentioned 3 times in the test
The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.
What are you inferring from that? Interested to hear.
I assume they're implying the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro is more of a marketing/spec sheet thing than an actual meaningful feature
I saw some tests on it and it’s kind of a whatever feature. The iPhone depth of field is still far too deep even wide open. So the difference stopped down is kind of meaningless.
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
> Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture
This is like saying most users will never adjust the shutter speed. Of course they won't, because the software automatically adjusts it, just like it does on any traditional camera. For the aperture capable lens, the software adjusts the aperture automatically depending upon light and/or depth of field requirements of a scene.
And yes, photographs are still spectacularly important.
But...I don't get it regardless. You know that video also uses apertures on every such equipped device, right? Better depth of field if the environment allows it is a good thing.
> Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point
I feel like people are just saying silly bullshit now. Apple has made video a core part of their product reveals for years now. And current iPhones take outrageously good videos.
Also, being able to stop down aperture will have positive impacts on video in daylight.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
My gripe with iPhone is hunting white balance. Always happening when I'm shooting video.
I wonder if newer phones / camera apps are better.
The 18 Pro enables 'pro' features in the default camera app that finally allows you to set the white balance, shutter speed, aperture, but not the ISO.
It's about goddamn time.
Excited to use this feature in 2-5 years when I can get one cheap.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
They Huawei currently are the best when it comes to still pictures, it is the one area/feature they can win, nothing wrong with that. Where Apple wins is in the total hardware and software package, which is why they are better at the video end of the picture in comparison to their competition.
Samsung in the past has also held that distinction, being able to take very good still pictures, but they too fell down when it came to hardware and software, particularly when you start adding in video performance, which requires better software/hardware chops. Nothing is gonna beat Apple chip hardware right now.
The Huawei uses a 1 inch sensor which is vastly superior in terms of hardware wrt to Apple's one
The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.
> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays
As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.
I still think there is a line in the sand between post processing which is mostly about fixing the exposure/noise, and straight up AI up scaling which hallucinates details.
And I fear the more tech reviewers do these pixel peeping side by side comparisons between phones, the greater the incentive to cheat.
Why are the Chinese so… crass when they could be doing actual frontier stuff.
> You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras
iPhone, Samsung, Chinese phones, they all do fake moons now.
The iPhone certainly doesn’t.
Wait for cined's test. Here is the predecessor:
https://www.cined.com/lab-test-of-the-iphone-17-pro-rolling-...
The really problem of iPhone camera is not these benchmark things. The problem is that the photo captured by the “Modern iPhone” simply does not look nice , let say, compared to iPhone 4S.
I think we're fighting against the modern world here. My 4S did and still does take the last great iPhone photos, before the processing pipeline ruined it for me, with over-sharpening, smeared noise-reduction and color flattening.
Thankfully we have access to raw DNGs in phones after the 4S, so we can create our own image processing pipeline.
But for "out of the camera" JPGs, the 4S is still supreme.
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background. Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
So google got beat at its own game, I believe Pixel 11 was really a disappointment.
Vibe-reviewed.
Ok so let's hack it