iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review: Scotland

Literally just had to leave a comment on this blog post after reading because he talks about how he's going to start leaving his Garmin InReach Mini at home because he can now use the satellite feature on his iPhone when he's out hiking in the Scottish mountains. As far as I'm aware, the satellite functionality is currently strictly for the US and Canadian markets only. I get that it's a big deal and a great technological achievement they want to brag about but I hope they are making it abundantly clear in other countries that this functionality is not available. If they're glossing over it, they're going to end up with a lot of people going into potentially dangerous situations with a false sense of security like this guy with potentially tragic consequences.

The Verge also mentioned that Apple goes overboard when it comes to noise reduction lately with their phones. It becomes really obvious when you compare an iPhone 13 with say a Pixel phone and there have been many complaints about it. Instead it looks like they continued to double down with it on the iPhone 14. It's a shame since they have such good hardware and ruin the pics with their photo processing pipeline.

I think we need a new way to judge cameras... Getting experts to zoom in on tricky corners is no longer a good way to test.<p>There needs to be a new metric that reflects the whole user journey of using the camera - from figuring out how it works, to taking new photos when one came out bad. How many attempts to get a photo of a serial number label down behind the dishwasher..? Do pictures of the moon look terrible because the lens has fingerprints all over and the user doesn&#x27;t realise? Can the camera run at the same time as google maps navigation and an audiobook without lag?

&gt; <i>Offloading photos&#x2F;videos via Lightning cable is another story. I’ve had some serious pains trying to transfer content from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. I’ve been on YouTube watching videos, unplugging, switching Lightning cables, restarting devices — doing all the things I can think of. I finally found a tip that said if you turn on Airplane mode, then Apple Photos will properly load, and thankfully it did.</i><p>&gt; <i>These pains offloading media are not a new issue specific to the iPhone 14 Pro, and I really hope it is solved soon.</i><p>I&#x27;m surprised that he didn&#x27;t consider AirDrop as a means of getting photos out. That&#x27;s how I transfer most of the photos I need to edit on my MacBook these days.

It&#x27;s good that he&#x27;s highlighting the potential issues with the eSim. To me, forcing every new iPhone user to go all-in with eSim is ridiculous. That will work for many, yet it could be a painful issue for some.<p>Given that they still sell iPhone 14 with regular SIM cards, why wouldn&#x27;t they allow that option in the US ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯!?

I’ve been kinda unimpressed with the iPhone 13 mini camera coming from the pixel 6 pro. I like everything else about the iPhone better, but the camera seems substantially worse. I have to edit pictures quite a bit to fix color balance issues. Here’s a recent example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobe.ly&#x2F;3qEZRVx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobe.ly&#x2F;3qEZRVx</a><p>(Lightroom won’t let me share both my edit and the unedited original but the blueish picture was taken at almost the same time and had the same general look as the edited picture.)<p>I’m not sure who would like the unedited version of the picture but I get weird color issues like this all the time on my mini. Here’s another one of my kid:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobe.ly&#x2F;3UerPEY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobe.ly&#x2F;3UerPEY</a><p>For anyone who has a doubt, I testify that my kid is not red and those cliffs were not blue.<p>Worst thing is it’s totally unpredictable when the issue is gonna crop up. It doesn’t happen in every picture. I don’t know what someone would do with a camera like this if they didn’t know how to edit to fix the colors.

I wonder if it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m getting old and jaded, but I really fail to get excited by this continuous flow of new devices (and &quot;stuff&quot; in general). I could get a new iPhone from my company, but I don&#x27;t even see the point.

I would appreciate if articles reviewing cameras did a better job of explaining why the pixel count is just a single (and highly manipulable) measure of imaging merit.<p>For all the pixel count, no company ever talks about pixel <i>size</i> (physical) and the noise characteristic as a result or the effective resolution. The imaging chip has not gotten physically larger between iPhones, I assume, so the pixels are just dividing the same light into more sites. Is this better?<p>People who don&#x27;t know will just assume that 48 MP, well that&#x27;s better than a Sony A7RIII now, right? Of course not.

I continue to find the iPhone&#x27;s &quot;night&quot; photos underwhelming compared to Google Pixel&#x27;s (haven&#x27;t tested other Android devices). Google seems to be doing a much better job at stacking or other Computational Photography tricks.<p>Considering Apple&#x27;s marketing focuses so much on the camera, and they have so much experience in the domain, I&#x27;m kind of shocked they continue to be so disappointing.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s a style decision.<p>(I certainly haven&#x27;t tried playing with RAW, that&#x27;s beyond my level of care.)

Quite impressive when they shot at 48MP, but the pictures taken at 12MP just look like your bad, few generations old, non-pro iPhone photo.<p>As a very amateur photograph that doesn&#x27;t want to carry his DSLR all the time I considered getting it for the 48MP but after reading the review and seeing what would be most of the pictures I would take (the 12MP ones), it&#x27;s a hard pass.

This is an excellent video review by Peter McKinnon. I really like his studio shot comparison between his Canon mirrorless camera and the iPhone 14 Pro.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oh9wNWA6bSQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oh9wNWA6bSQ</a>

Regarding the desire for a Red Screen Mode to save night vision I have long used the Accessibility feature of a red Color Filter

I have the iPhone 13 Pro, and I wish Apple would fix the Live Photos video flash bug <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;live-photo-flashing-exposure-bug.2347720&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;live-photo-flashing-exp...</a><p>This is a first world problem: the flash that appears in their flagship Live Photos photo&#x2F;video feature has ruined some great vacation photos that were hard to take.<p>I don&#x27;t know if this is fixed in the iPhone 14 &#x2F; iOS 16.

I&#x27;m really conflicted about if I&#x27;m going to be shooting in 48MP or 12MP for normal use. Most of my photos are taken of friends in casual settings and used for social media. Many times a good shot requires capturing a number of photos in sequence, with all but one or two discarded.<p>The local file storage and backup capacity requirements for 48MP are going to get crazy. I may only shoot in 48MP in rare cases when I really want the super quality and normally leave in 12MP mode.

I though era of &quot;more megapixel = better picture&quot; is gone, but apparently not.<p>All that matters in technical quality of cameras is dynamic range. That is related to sensor size, more specific to pixel size that has ability to absorb light. It is simple physics.<p>Those who need camera sensor quality should check this charts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photonstophotos.net&#x2F;Charts&#x2F;PDR.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photonstophotos.net&#x2F;Charts&#x2F;PDR.htm</a>

Feels like the iPhone could use a micro SD card at this point. If I&#x27;m gonna use a phone as a cinema camera, shooting 4k and 48 MP stills I don&#x27;t want to be clogging up my bandwidth uploading a ton of footage to iCloud when I&#x27;m probably going to cut it in Premiere or something on my desktop.<p>My drone is like this — it has an internal hard drive, but it&#x27;s way more flexible and convenient to shoot to its optional micro SD card.

At 48MP these things are starting to tread on the territory of the &quot;super resolution&quot; mode of my Olympus camera body. Of course, the top-of-the-lone iPhone is also larger than that camera body in 2 out of 4 relevant dimensions, and costs more. The new iPhones are so big and so expensive that the idea that I would rather carry one than a big expensive camera is starting to seem questionable. In fact, if I had a choice, I am quite sure I&#x27;d rather my camera with a cheap lens were stolen, rather than my iPhone.

I don&#x27;t think a sponsored review of a popular phone camera belongs here.

Cinematic mode for me is a bust. At 30 fps it was extremely choppy when I panned side to side, which makes it unusable. I was shocked at how bad it looked so I’m wondering how 24 fps can be any better.

I’m in doubt if I should upgrade from 12 Pro Max. Please share your opinion. The main reason for the upgrade for me is a better camera. Is the difference noticeable between 12 Pro Max and 14 Pro?

I found mrwhosetheboss youtube comparison against the Samsung S22 ultra helpful too. Very interesting how different the approaches are despite both being aimed at top end

My 13 Pro is so good, and it sounds like there are still issues with 48 megapixel photos (a lag in processing the files, compatibility.) I&#x27;ll wait till the next model.

I want to see how the camera stacks up against other phones from other makers in the same class.<p>Dxomark does very thorough comparison tests. I will wait for their results.

I wish he’d use the normal camera app and not a paid for app.

Who cares? The improvements here are beyond minuscule. It would affect my life more if Chipotle came out with a new flavor of chicken