iPhone 11
Customers love iPhone because we focus on technologies that matter in their lives,” Apple’s Kaiann Drance said when introducing the iPhone 11 yesterday. If that’s the case, then Apple’s competitors have been doing the same thing for even longer when it comes to the camera. What might previously have been dismissed as gimmicks are now headline features for Apple. The two biggest additions to the iPhone 11 camera system, the ultrawide lens and night mode, are commonplace on Android phones. That’s not really relevant for most iPhone buyers, who just want a phone that runs iOS and will enjoy the new capabilities. But since it’s impossible to know whether Apple has caught up to competitors in the area that matters most — basic image quality — the camera section of the presentation felt a little flat.
Apple was among the first companies to introduce a dual-camera system on a phone, and certainly one of the first to make it really useful. The iPhone 7 Plus’ telephoto camera enabled portrait mode and greatly improved zoom image quality, the one area where phones still lag cheap point-and-shoot cameras. So it was a little surprising to see Apple ditch the telephoto camera in favor of the new ultrawide lens for the iPhone 11’s dual-camera system.
That’s also true of the iPhone 11 Pro, which features a triple-camera system like every other flagship phone this year. Apple’s Phil Schiller called it a “pro camera system,” though if the Pro is doing anything beyond the regular 11 other than keeping the telephoto around and improving the aperture to f/2.0, he didn’t say. Schiller pointed out that between the ultrawide and telephoto cameras, the 11 Pro has a zoom range of 4x, which is true. But it still doesn’t have any further reach than the XS, and it can’t match phones like Oppo’s Reno 10x Zoom, which (confusingly) has about 8x optical zoom range with its ultrawide and 5x telephoto lenses.
Night mode, meanwhile, is a feature that exposed Apple’s lack of competitiveness in low-light photography when Google brought it to Pixel phones a year ago, and the situation was compounded by Huawei’s even more impressive take on the idea. In truth, the iPhone XS is worse than basically all of its competitors in low light even when they’re not using a night mode, though the way the iPhone 11 automatically activates the feature should help a lot there. Again, though, it’s a defensive addition rather than an innovation. Apple simply had to add a night mode this year to even remain in the conversation.
As far as basic image quality goes, Apple didn’t have a lot to say. Last year the company made a big hardware leap by adding a physically larger main image sensor to the iPhone XS, so we were unlikely to see a similar change in the iPhone 11. The biggest difference with the main camera is that it now uses 100 percent focus pixels across the whole sensor, which should supposedly give three times faster autofocusing in low light. The selfie camera gets a more significant improvement, jumping from 7 to 12 megapixels and using a wider lens — though portrait selfies are zoomed and cropped to 7 megapixels by default.
iPhone 11 Pro Starting from ₹99,900 MRP All-new triple-camera system (Ultra Wide, Wide, Telephoto) Up to 20 hours of video playback1 Water resistant to a depth of 4 metres for up to 30 minutes2 5.8” or 6.5” Super Retina XDR
iPhone 11 Starting from ₹64,900 MRP All-new dual-camera system (Ultra Wide, Wide) Up to 17 hours of video playback1 Water resistant to a depth of 2 metres for up to 30 minutes2 6.1” Liquid Retina HD display3
Tags:
Tech