The iPhone 15 Pro Max ultra-wide angle (13mm) shot of Knox Church, Dunedin. Photo / Juha Saarinen
OPINION
This year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max is pricey, but for smartphone photographers and videographers who want the best device in the local market, this is it.
Imaging benchmarking authority DXOmark tested the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and rated its camera as number two after the Huawei P60, which is unobtanium in New Zealand. The difference in score was just two points.
The high rating should put paid to the online kvetching that as the camera specifications of the iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone 15 Pro Max are fairly similar, this year’s model is just an incremental upgrade.
You can understand why users would think that, accustomed as they are to wild increases in numbers every year. Apple and other smartphone vendors have kind of dug themselves into a hole here by making the seemingly impossible just work, such as taking handheld photos with 48 to 50-megapixel cameras that come out sharp and not blurry from shaking and vibrations.
All the cameras in the iPhone 15 Pro Max have received improvements, and the 120-millimetre telephoto camera is completely new. It makes a big difference, letting you get closer to objects, and for portraits.
With the three cameras, you get seven focal lengths: macro mode for close-ups, 13mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 48mm and 120mm.
Well, kind of. Only the 13mm, 24mm and 120mm focal lengths are real, optical ones, but Apple’s computational photography tech means you get excellent results at all seven settings. In fact, you start thinking like an old-school snapper, especially since you can lock the main camera to 24mm, 28mm and 35mm by default.
A digital zoom for the 120mm tele camera gets you up to 25 times zoom for a crazy focal length equivalent of 658mm, but images come out blotchy and grainy, so that setting is not super-useful, unlike the macro mode, which produces great shots.
As an aside, the periscope tetraprism tele lens was probably delayed for years, as Apple had to duke it out with Israel’s Corephotonics (now owned by Samsung) in court over camera patents, and had to devise a new way to fold a long 120mm focal length into a very small space.
The camera system does have its foibles. The bigger 24-megapixel photos with more details are a drawcard, but you get them with the main camera at 24mm and 35mm with default settings; the other cameras and focal lengths produce 12-megapixel photos.
This is due to the sensor (a yet-to-be-revealed Sony model) combining four individual photodiodes into a larger super-sized one for better light capture, and multiple images being joined together by the Photonic Engine chip.
As with past iPhone Pros, there can be noticeable colour shifts when switching cameras. Clouds captured by the ultra-wide camera had a slightly greenish tint compared to the wide and tele, for instance.
A fast new A17 Pro chipset means big 12 and 48-megapixel Raw and 48-megapixel high efficiency (HEIC) compressed pics can be taken as quickly as the standard 12 and 24-megapixel ones, and the added performance makes it easier to work with demanding formats like ProRes for video.
Speaking of video: at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, and amazingly good stabilisation and autofocus, it is another reason to cast side-eyes on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, especially if your existing device is a few years old.
The cropped 2.8K action mode video introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro works really well with the 120mm tele, the excellent stabilisation smoothing out shakiness superbly. For journo work, I’d be tempted to leave the phone in that mode by default, if only there was a way to do that.
As in the past, Apple’s ace in the hole for photography and videography is its integrated ecosystem in which iPhones, iPads and MacBooks work seamlessly together to edit and view content.
That package, which includes really good bundled software like the Photos app on macOS, is a major competitive advantage that’s hard to beat.
On balance, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is currently probably the best camera that you’ll always carry with you. If you can justify the Pro-sized price which starts at $2499, of course.