Apple devoted a few moments from its nearly 1-hour iPhone 15 presentation to the new Pro models’ custom 28mm and 35mm shooting modes. Technically, you get a cropped 28mm or 35mm portion from the original 24mm primary lens and you get it in the same 24MP resolution as the default 24mm images. Apple says that with the iPhone 15 Pro, “it’s like having seven Pro lenses in your pocket”.
This is a convenient feature for those who prefer focal lengths shorter than 24mm. You tap 1x mode in the camera to go to 28mm (1.2x) and once again to go to 35mm (1.5x). You can either create a default camera focal length, which is extra convenient.
But is Apple doing more than just cropping the image and returning it to its original size? To find out this we did a small experiment.
Before we start, here are the default 24mm shots of both views from the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The images on the left are 28mm captured by the iPhone’s native camera app and output in the default 24MP. We manually cropped the shots on the right and upscaled them to 24MP using Photoshop’s Preserve Details 2.0 resampling method. Looking at the results together, we’d say there’s no discernible difference between Apple’s 28mm shot and our simple crop-and-upscale.
Don’t forget to tap the compare button below the swatches to get a 100% zoomed-in look for yourself.
It’s the same story with 35mm images. It appears that Apple cropped the 24mm shot here and increased the resolution to 24MP, applying some sharpening along the way. There’s no fancy computational photography going on here.
So there you have it – it’s like three actual lenses and four crop modes, for a total of seven focal lengths. The convenience provided by Apple cannot be denied. We’re sure many people (including some people here on Team GSMArena) will happily use a narrow default focal length for the native camera. But it’s not magic and comes at the expense of image quality. It’s something others have done for years – Samsung’s default zoomed-in selfie, which expands as you see more people in the frame.
This is just an observation we made while working on our review of the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at Apple’s best phones to date!