The iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera System is MIND-BLOWING By mathphotographer

In this video, I want to deep dive into the camera system of the brand new iPhone 12 Pro max, and this is by far the largest iPhone apple ever brought to market 6.7 inches diagonal. And what caught my attention most when I unboxed it was the camera system here with these huge lenses and if you put them in perspective with the 11 pro mix, you see how much larger these lenses actually are and the general rule of thumb is: if you have bigger lenses very likely, you will catch more light, and you will also have better images. That's in general, true, not always true. If you go into the Lacey m series camera system, you find a lot of lightweight compacts, small lenses, which are nevertheless fast and provide excellent image. Quality and inconsistency with that experience is also like a camera system built into Huawei smartphones. So this is the Huawei p40 pro plus.

It has much smaller lenses, but nevertheless is an excellent camera system, and there are lots of videos on my channel where you can look this up and compare you know my impressions of Huawei smartphones with other smartphones. Another smartphone which caught my attention with its lenses in the same way, is the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra, and this is the largest camera module we've ever seen on Samsung smartphones. It's also sticking out a little and these lenses are large, but not as large as the ones from the iPhone 12 Pro max and people following me on my channel. They know I complained a lot about the s20 ultra from Samsung. Here, I think, with the note 20 ultra Samsung did everything right.

This is by far, in my opinion, the best android smartphone for photographers currently available in the market. Now, let's focus completely on the 12 pro max, I will share lots of sample images, and videos will basically also comment, will also tell people what I don't like, but that almost all the time has to do with the native camera app here, where you still have a lot of restrictions, and you don't get the same level of freedom or degree of flexibility, as you sometimes have it. On native camera, apps on android smartphones. Let's kick off the video now before looking into live, shooting and samples of photos and videos in the night mode. Let's have a first look.

What this camera system is made of in the iPhone 12 promo and first, we have a 47 larger sensor, and we have a larger pixel size. We also have image stabilization based on sensor shifts and that's something. We know from professional system cameras, for instance, from Sony, Lacey, Nike and canon and is called in-body image stabilization on these cameras. Besides the lighter scanner, we have three main camera models here and the first one is a 12 megapixel wide angle lens. It has an equivalent of 26 millimeter focal length.

If we compare this with a full frame sensor, it's a seven element lens: it has a large pixel size and this image stabilization we just saw in that censorship technology and the aperture is fixed at f 1.6 everything you are seeing on that phone in terms of wider or more closed. Aperture is software simulation and is not related to the optical properties of that lens. Next, we have an ultrawide camera. Also, 12 megapixels aperture is now at f 2.4. Five elements in the lens and the full frame equivalent focal length is 30 millimeters, and we have a very wide field of view here of 120 degrees.

Last but not least, we have a telephoto module with 12 megapixels, and this is a full frame equivalent focal length of 65 millimeters. Now, if we think about that, for a moment, wide angle was 13, millimeters 13 millimeters times 5 equals 65 millimeters, which is the focal length of that telephoto lens, and that means all in the iPhone 12 Pro max has five times. Optical zoom Denmark already tested the iPhone 12 Pro max and came up with an overall score of 130 for camera, and if you look in the smartphone ranking on the left-hand side of what's in display in front of you, you see that the iPhone 12 promo is ranking at number. Four currently number five is the iPhone 12 Pro, so not a big difference. All the other phones are from Chinese manufacturers, but Apple made it into the top rankings with their new phones, the user interface of the native camera.

App as it is shipped by apple, is minimalistic and has the usual suspects on it. You have here the time-lapse function. The time-lapse function is now nicely working at night and in low light conditions, and I'm going to demonstrate this in the course of the video it's very nice that apple included a night mode for time lapses. You have on the slow motion different parameters to set in. You can do this directly on the screen here.

So I can change here from 240 to 120 and back to 240 frames per seconds. It's full HD, so 1080p, not a 4k video, yet on slow motion, as you find it on some other manufacturers phones on the video mode. Also, you can change this here.24 30 frames per seconds, 60 frames per second, you can switch from 4k to HD, that's all nice and all possible, and you can also change this in the settings of the camera which I'm going to cover in just a few seconds. In a moment, the photo app is um for photography. Coming from the wide angle, 13 millimeters up to 2.5 times optical zoom, on the tailor lens covering a range of five times overall optical zoom on the whole camera system, as I mentioned before, what is nice? You can also use a digital to zoom here, so I can go up to 12 times digital zoom, which is only 10 times on the iPhone 12 Pro, but on the pro max you can go up to 12 times, which is nice. So that's, basically what I wanted to share here.

The portrait mode is working in the same way as before. You have different settings on the right hand, side, and you can also change the software simulated. That's important, the software simulated aperture here that is all nice and all working. So you get your background more blurry, but this is just a digital simulation. Here is not a true aperture, which is open more than you would find it on, let's say professional camera, and then we have the panorama mode which is going beyond 60 megapixels.

If you do it rightly, and that is also something which is nice now, if we go into the camera menu on the settings, we actually have here all kinds of things to change. So you can change your video formats in the way which you can also switch them in the native camera, app graphical user interface. There are a few things to note here. First, what I deactivated here is smart HDR. If you have smart, HDR deactivated, you actually see in the native camera app a HDR button, and then I can manually control whether I want to have this or not, so it's just here now.

HDR is basically deactivated, and now it is activated- and I think that's a much better way of dealing with it. There would be many things to say about the camera app itself, but also about the settings, but that's not what this video is about. So, let's move on now to my live, shooting demonstrations and sample images and sample videos, and let's have a look, how fantastic this phone is working in its night mode. The night mode of the iPhone 12 Pro mix is still restricted to 30 seconds as a maximum, and if you hit the soft shutter button, it starts to count down these 30 seconds. As you can see, on the right-hand side I accelerated this here and the results were absolutely mind-blowing.

This is an image from the wide angle lens, with light trails from cars and trucks passing by and clearly a nice shot very clear, very crisp, and this is a shot with the main lens of the iPhone 12 Pro max, and I think this looks really, really good on our way back. Stopping by and taking images over lake Zurich also revealed a very clear crisp, night sky and nice lights from the cities around the lake. At the night of my shooting it was a very clear night sky, and you could even see the Milky Way indicated in the images here, and then I mounted the iPhone on a tripod and just pointed it towards the sky above me, and I found this, which is by far the best Milky Way picture I've ever taken with a smartphone. I tweaked this a little in post-processing in Lightroom, but in general, that's what the iPhone camera sensor has seen and provided to me in terms of an image, turning our attention to more normal shooting situations for the night mode in cities, for instance. This is an image from bahnhofstrasse in Zurich and the clarity and crispiness of that image.

The sharpness and, of course, also the low noise level is just fantastic. So the time-lapse, mode of the new iPhone also has a night mode now, and what you see here is a screen recording, and it looks as if every single frame would get blurry based on the low light environment, but that's by far not the case, and I'm going to show you now a time-lapse, which was completely conducted only on the iPhone 12 Pro max enjoy the show. The portrait mode now also has a night mode, and you see here a screen recording from a test shooting of my model here, and I should say it works very, very well, and you can also choose these different lighting modes on the right hand, side and then get completely different results. Very, very promising, very good. The portrait mode delivers nice images with a nice tone of the skin and a nice background blurriness, depending on what f-stop in the software simulation you are setting up and the special light effects you can choose on.

The right-hand side of your settings also provide interesting nationality, all in very good results on the new portrait knight mode. Just as a side remark, I also experimented with the new portrait night mode on non-human targets or subjects, and this is a photo taken through the window of a shop in Zurich, where I applied the portrait night mode to this bird on display and the result is quite nice. The background blurriness kicked in depending on the f-stop settings in the software simulation, and then I also applied one of these lighting conditions. Filters on the right hand, side and the resulting images were almost a little spooky or scary. Coming back to video, the video night mode works fantastic, it's always crisp clean and almost noise-free footage.

You get here looks very nice and video stabilization when you walk with your phone is also, I think, just fantastic, and you see this even better when we change the perspective to the streets here, and you can clearly see how the iPhone 12 Pro mix is stabilizing my movements with the phone. In my hand, slow motion also works with a night mode. Now, and this is a 1080p video in slow motion now worked very well, was shot hold and very well video stabilized from the iPhone 12 Pro max and in general nice effects you can achieve with the slow motion mode on this new iPhone here. Clearly, the iPhone also performs very, very well in better lighting conditions. This is a shot early morning somewhere in canton sweets in the mountains, just very nice, very sharp, very crisp and in general also nice from the colors, and I think the iPhone 12 Pro max is getting very close to what we would call a professional camera system and uh is all built into a smartphone.

Of course, the way the iPhone was replicating this early morning light over the mountains was exactly what I saw in front of my eyes, very natural color reproduction and the level of detail we get from the sensor, combined with the substantially larger lenses now, as I pointed out at the beginning of this video, it's just incredible a little later than the fox started to rise up from the valley towards the sky, and I decided to do a panorama shot which has a very high resolution now, and I think also here, the images look very good, seeing the fog rising, I decided for a time-lapse, enjoy the show going back to the beginning of this video. When we had these four top-notch flagship smartphones on the table. I come to the following conclusion in my many reviews on smartphone photography on android phones, but in particular on Huawei phones. People very often heard me saying, for instance, when I spoke about the Huawei p40 pro plus, these are the best camera systems in the smartphone world, but I will always keep my iPhone because it has also a good camera system and, most importantly, I'm sitting with my content in the Apple ecosystem, and that's why I always will have an iPhone because of my notes, my music. My TV shows my videos and all of that with the iPhone 12 Pro max.

This game changed this phone. I want to have primarily because of its camera system and as a secondary reason. I need to have it because I'm sitting in the Apple ecosystem, so the iPhone 12 Pro max in my opinion, is a real game. Changer and you might argue, there are changes here and there which are gradual, but in general I think, the overall package, the value proposition, is something of the best in terms of smartphones. You can get going into 2021.

If you liked that video don't forget to drop me a thumbs up thanks for watching and peace out.

Source : mathphotographer