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Another Approach
7 October 2024
Almost a year after updating our iPhone 6 Plus to the iPhone 16 Max Pro, we found ourselves avoiding the 5x telephoto lens. Too many times we saw a nice image on the phone only to find a pixelated JPEG on our laptop.
DNG Capture. iPhone 15 Pro Max back triple camera at 2.22mm, f2.2, 1/40 second and ISO 400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
The image is of the pen that come with a Wacom Intuos BT drawing tablet we're testing. We've had it hooked up for a week, which is all it should take to do a review, but that too is giving us fits.
We wondered if some hidden-away camera setting might be to blame for the unusable results.
One default setting we changed was Prioritize Faster Shooting. We're never shooting kids' sports, for example, so no loss. But it could explain why the dat we were getting from that lens was a lot less than we expected.
The other thing we did, just to make this test more interesting, was to enable 12-Mp Raw capture in the Camera app, rather than a JPEG. A simple tap at the top of the Camera screen did that.
We made sure we were close enough to be in Macro mode and took a shot. Later we tried it with a JPEG capture, too.
JPEG Capture. iPhone 15 Pro Max back triple camera at 2.22mm, f2.2, 1/45 second and ISO 400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
The DNG was 12.2 megapixels while the JPEG occupied just 299K. After we applied the same Camera Raw filter adjustments we had applied to the DNG, we didn't notice a difference in image quality.
What if we shot JEG again but turned the Prioritize Faster Shooting back on? It just "prioritizes" after all. It doesn't force anything.
Looks just as sharp. So our testing proves, well, nothing.
But we did get some decent 5x macro shots from our iPhone 15 Pro Max for once.