A Billion Pixels a Second: Inside Apple's iPhone 16 Camera Labs

The title doesn’t do it justice - everything with images quickly adds up.<p>Doing 120 fps video at 4K so that any chosen frame looks amazing without artifacts is really quite an achievement.<p>The microphones were actually more interesting to me, that you can get lavalier performance from the tiny mics in the phone that are physically far from the person being recorded is seriously clever.<p>Getting this to work some of the time is already an achievement but I think people underestimate how much work goes into making it work across all different scenarios.

&gt; 38% of people said that better cameras are a main motivation for buying a new phone<p>This strikes me as just a reflection of the ad campaigns. Apple promotes “better cameras” for every new iPhone, almost exclusively in their ads, so it’s not surprising that’s what people would say. With every new phone being just an incremental upgrade, hyping up the camera is the only way to get people to drop a $1000 on a new one. Most of these 38% won’t be able to tell the difference between a phone pic taken 5 or more years ago.

This is really a puff piece - for instance, Nokia had a 1 billion pixels per second processing pipeline on their 808 PureView phone. In 2012.

One thing about the iPhone microphone. I had a beautiful day the other day here with some light drizzle and the sea waves were rocking nicely it was a great sound and the beach was empty. Great feeling. I wanted to record this but I only had my iPhone - was just walking in the beach. So neither the default recording app of the iphone and neither any of the ones I tried, could capture the ocean waves or the sound of the drizzle. I had previously (intentionally) set out to the beach with the intent to capture audio and did so with my Laptop + external mic. My conclusion is that unfortunately that is the way it has to be, and that it&#x27;s not possible to capture audio on a whim as is with photos.

The body text is really uncomfortably sycophantic.

Two unanswered question: why not put the camera in the middle of the phone? And why do the cameras keep moving around?

Photos on my wife&#x27;s camera look slightly deformed. The people don&#x27;t look like themselves, their faces are just slightly off. I&#x27;m blaming the AI inside of the photos app on iPhone, but I&#x27;m not sure.<p>People&#x27;s face look perfect on my mediocre Android though.<p>I&#x27;m never going to buy or use an iPhone. Even the questionable advantage which was supposed to be the iPhone&#x27;s camera is fake.

I wonder how much that wire mesh floor distorts the recording result? I guess it must be insignificant, since the walls, ceiling and floor absorb almost all reflected sound waves?