iPhone 8: A Photographer’s Review By Tyler Stalman

Well, it's just my luck that the first iPhone that I'm going to review happens to be the least anticipated iPhone in history. This is a review of the iPhone 8 or more specifically, the iPhone 8 plus, is what I've got for me personally. I think it's much more interesting to compare this to the phones that people are likely to be upgrading from or choosing between. So most the comparison will be between the 6s and also the Samsung S 8 I also use the galaxy quite a bit for shooting photos for my wife's fashion blog. She really prefers the way that it comes out of camera, so I have spent quite a bit of time with flagship Android phones as well, and going to spend half of this video just talking about the camera, because taking photos and videos for our living is what I do to test the iPhone 8 plus we brought it to beautiful bow falls, which is basically our backyard in Calgary. It's got beautiful, blue water mountains.

It's got everything we need to test a new camera. There's a few things. I've been noticing so far. An interesting choice that Apple made is to add HDR by default, so that every time you take a photo, it's saving an HDR version if it decides to and no original, which is a big change from the past. There are two sides to this one: because of the new Apple designed image signal, processing, they're able to do better HDR.

It looks a lot more natural, less fake in the highlights. It draws less attention to itself, and it's doing a much better job. That's why they put it on default because they felt like they could trust that everybody is able to use it without it screwing up their photos. But on the other hand, it's not quite perfect. There are still times when HDR it looks.

Weird I, don't trust it entirely. I'm, probably going to switch back to optional HDR I. Don't think everybody needs to do this if you don't mind it, but that's what I prefer when I shoot the iPhone seven and eight compared to other cameras, I also find that they want to overexpose quite a bit, which was astounding, and I wonder if that's to do with the HDR, because it knows it's going to recover the highlights. So it's bringing the shadows up since HDR is aiming to save the highlights. You'd bring up the level of the shadows, so there's less noise in the shadows.

The second exposure saves those highlights, and you've just got a cleaner image in that range. That's how you get HDR Apple clearly decided to go in a bit of a different direction with the image processing here, the saturation has clearly been boosted, so it looks a lot more like Android. Does the Samsung s8? Has this similar luck of just more saturated and a bit more sharpening, which I think actually looks really great for both cameras? I think it's an improvement. It's not something you're going to find in their marketing material, but the difference in how they would, I did to adjust. Their images in camera is going to make a huge difference for everybody.

What they have been focusing marketing on is the new studio lighting feature it's supposed to emulate. What a photographer does with their lights. I think it more accurately emulates what a photographer does in post-production. Afterwards, it's not really convincingly a lighting effect, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. What I found is that, if the light was already pretty good, it could definitely enhance it.

Add some contrast around cheek bones and just kind of give photos a little boost. What it didn't work as well for is repairing photos that had kind of poor lighting to start with, and, of course, the Plus model still has the portrait mode that adds the depth of field effect to the back. Every other manufacturer has been picking this up lately, but I think apples doing a really great job of how it renders the both, and the background, like that blur looks very convincing. I can tell engineers spend a lot of time on it. I took a bunch of different cameras and shot comparison photos and what you notice in ideal lighting conditions is a steady improvement going from the iPhone 5 s, 6 s, 7 & 8 in the 8 and s 8 are kind of similar, but then, if you try shooting in lower light conditions, they're a little sharper a little less noise and keep working for into the ultimate low-light camera model, which it does a really impressive job.

The image stabilization starts to kick in, and this leads me to one of the most underrated features about this phone: the slow sync flash that it's got. So that means that it'll hold the shutter open longer, so that more light is able to hit the sensor. Then the flash goes off, and the two exposures are much more balanced together. So everything behind the subject is a lot more visible, even though it wasn't lit up by the flash. This takes the iPhones flash from a place where it's like pretty gross, and you don't want to use it in any conditions to actually quite usable, and I'm.

Going to turn it on more often than I ever have before. With video, they've added a bunch of new frame rate options, which is really great, you can shoot in 24 frames per second now, which is what I usually shoot these videos on, so I'll be able to match that video more easily and some crazy, fast options like 60 frames per second 4k, which I can't shoot on my much more expensive cameras and also 240 frames per second 1080p, which I can't shoot on any of my cameras at all. This is crazy. What they're, putting in there, and I think a lot of its due to that improved process or improved GPU. Keep in mind that when you're shooting slow-motion, the autofocus gets kind of terrible for some reason, I, don't know why.

But you have to be more careful with it so for upgrades from the iPhone 6s, here's what you can expect, not surprisingly a much faster processor not only than previous generations, but this is the fastest phone on the market right now, Apple's an 11 Bionic chip is so much faster than what the hardware seems to need that you don't actually really notice the difference. It was already very fast in the iPhone 7, but now is such a fast processor and additional efficient processing cores. This means that the battery life is improved without making the battery bigger, especially when it comes to internet browsing watching video or just other things that are processor intensive. The other big change, I'm sure you've already heard about is wireless charging. Now the best part about this is that they decided to go with the cheese standard.

That's already in use, and you're going to find it all over the place. Ikea is putting it into furniture. You can buy it anywhere. I. Think the experience of wireless charging is great.

It's a lot slower than when you plug in your phone, but I go through a lot of iPhone cables because they all break like all of them right away. I, don't know why everybody isn't complaining about this all the time, but I have to buy a lot of my phone cables because they wear out, but Apple using a standard like this means that hopefully it'll push the whole industry forward, and we're going to get faster wireless charging sooner since the days of the 6s, the phone has gotten very water and dust resistant, they've tightened that even a little more with the iPhone 8, but it's more or less the same rules as the seven you can take it underwater. A little, don't keep it there nothing's guaranteed the speaker's got a lot better. Going from the success to the seven, and now they've got a bit better again from the 78. You can definitely hear better bass response from it and that jump between the 6s and the eight, where both speakers on the top and bottom are being used, makes a really huge difference and for me, I, listen to a lot of podcasts I do listen to things out loud, it's incredibly useful.

It sounds better I love this feature and how many people talk about it. The screens have gotten brighter over time, going from 500 nits up to 625 nits. That just means that in daylight you can see your phone a little more. It's not a huge difference, but its good improvement. This should keep moving forward, but there's been even more important screen updates since then like adding a p3 display which has a wider color gamut, the difference doesn't jump out to everybody right away, but it's one of those things that, as we look back at older screens, they're just going to seem less vibrant, there's actually fewer colors, reproduced in the oranges and the greens.

Again, average people may not notice it, but for photographers it's really quite nice, and another thing I appreciate- is that the true tone display really helps. You see colors a bit more accurately, especially compared to night shift. It would just schedule the screen getting a bit more yellow in the evening. Most people leave this at the default setting, which makes it look way too. Yellow.

Please don't do that if you're going to use night shift just barely turn it on, but with true tone, you don't have to set any settings. You just turn it on in a sensor detects with the surrounding light is like and just makes the screen look at the appropriate white balance for that room in the iPhone 7, plus they added a telephoto lens, that's still around in the iPhone 8 plus, and it's going to be there in the iPhone 10. It's a really great addition. Apple also started designing their own GPU, which is that a huge performance jump since they were using third-party vendors, and this not only means you're going to have better graphics and games, but things like machine learning lean really heavily on GPUs. So far, Apple taking any other hardware design in-house has been really beneficial to all of us.

Like look at that CPU performance, it's amazing and Apple also designed their own image signal processor now and that's part of what leads to the better low-light performance. That's all the good stuff. There are a few downsides. It's still missing a headphone jack I still am frustrated by this and adding the glass back for wireless charging means that it is more breakable, and we've already heard that it's going to be more expensive to repair the back of the phone. Then the screen, so you're going to want to be extra careful with this phone, and I'm going to keep a case on it, pretty much all the time.

By the way, all the other reviewers show the iPhones always without a case, but don't we all use cases. Maybe everyone in the world is just less clumsy than me, but I do not trust myself. Another downside for a lot of people's the design has barely changed. It really does look like previous phones. It is the best iteration of that design.

But if you were hoping for something new, it's not this, and also I was hoping. This would be the moment that Apple might embrace us b/c across the whole line. I know it was a long shot, but the way they've sort of half adopted on the laptops, but they haven't spread it across other devices. It just feels a bit neglected and I think it has. A lot of potential I want to include a bit of iOS 11 in this I know it's not exclusive to the phone, we're all going to get it, but it's kind of part of the state of a current iPhone and part of your decision-making process.

So some of my favorite changes include moving to a new image codec, which is Ha f or heath, and it's based on the video codec HEV C. Not only does it look great, but it should be so much more efficient that you should be able to store about twice as many photos on the same amount of storage. Also, it still stores things like the depth data, that's being captured in the camera and for live photos. This means they can embed. Both the image data and the video data into one file, and since it's the same compression codecs, storing both the video and photo every frame of the video, looks almost as good as the still like you can use them to replace it in your library, if you're, a professional you're not going to do this, there's a lot less dynamic range in the video stills, but it's way better than it used to be with any iOS 10 device.

Now every frame of a live photo looks pretty great and the long exposures with live photos are really freaking cool. You just take a normal photo, and it does a bunch of intelligence with the image stabilization to figure out which part of the image shouldn't be moving and keep the motion in the other parts so that you get blur exactly where it should be for a long exposure. It's really well done. I've got a complaint as well since about iOS 9 I think there's been a decrease in the stability of the operating system, just random little crashes bugs here and there I think Apple needs to stay. On top of this, I like when I can say that my Apple products just work because when they don't, it tries me insane so, on the day of its release, the iPhone 8 was the best iPhone ever made I, don't think Apple slacked off on this one.

They did deliver a solid upgrade. That is worth it. If you're, you know two generations back, that's usually when you upgrade anyway, it's not as exciting as the iPhone 10, but I. Don't think everybody needs that kind of learning curve when they upgrade. If the eight looks like it's the phone for you, it probably is thanks for watching guys.

I would love to see some samples of what you shot on your iPhone 8, so send them my way on Twitter, I'm at Stall man, and I'll see you there.

Source : Tyler Stalman