The iPhone XS Camera By Tyler Stalman

I'm here with Brandon Hear, who was kind enough to bring an iPhone 10s max, so we could play with it and test out the camera today, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get my phone as quickly as I wanted to, so Brandon was kind enough to. Let me use his and even unbox it I didn't really have time to do the full, deep dive review I would have liked to, and instead I spent a day focused on testing different aspects of the new camera: hey Brandon. What are you looking to find out about this new iPhone camera I'd like to know about they'd, really like to show off the brighter conditions in the keynote? And besides that, I'd like to know about that variable aperture, not for how good or usable that feature is, but you know we'll see every year, Apple wants the f1 to have new tent pole camera features that they can talk. A lot about this year in 2018 are some of the biggest changes we've seen year-over-year in a long time, so quickly a list. What those changes are, and then we're gonna look at the results. All the biggest changes come from Apple's new image signal processing, which comes from the huge updates to the knurl engine.

This leads to a lot of small changes for image quality, but the biggest one is what they call smart HDR in the keynote they mentioned, there's a new sensor on the front-facing camera. But surprisingly, they didn't talk about the rear camera having a 30% larger sensor, which is a huge jump, and this means that each pixel on the sensor can receive more data and I. Think it's leading to a lot of the biggest improvements we've seen on the camera. They also forgot to mention the rear lens is a little wider, but they did talk about that. Portrait mode now has variable aperture, which you can change after you take in the photo, starting with the selfie camera.

There's a lot more dynamic range thanks to smart HDR, which especially means that you lose less detail in the highlights and a surprise feature is that there also seems to be some default skin smoothing going on, and this feature represents a theme in some of the camera updates that they're really going after images that will look good to the widest possible audience if you work as a photographer, which is how I make a living, you always want to add these effects afterwards. Only if you want them, it should always be a choice, but most people will never get around to making that choice, so apples making some processing decisions that a lot of people will really like right out of the camera, but you can't really go and undo them. Some of the biggest camera changes in Sr to the self-basting camera, which is now stabilized. How stable, is this? It's also a little faster, should be better in low light, I'm really impressed by this image stabilization. You can see a little of artifacts with it, but that's totally worth it.

The effect is that it's much smoother video. So when you're walking and recording a selfie, it looks way better. This is actually a three-way collaboration here and yeah. My wife is gonna, be modeling for some of our test. Photos and I want to compare the tennis, max10 and the 7, because most of us really upgrade every two years anyway.

Now, if we look at the rear camera, it's got the same megapixels as it has for a few years, but comparing it to the iPhone 7, we can still see some serious improvements in sharpness and detail and compared to the iPhone 10 it's kind of similar, but these cameras have already been doing great and good lighting for years now, and besides, sharpness and megapixels have never been as important as dynamic range and dynamic range is so important, because you can still see that difference even from an image thumbnail, smart HDR is Apple's way of getting way more detail in the highlights and shadows. We've had HDR for a while. It's already been doing a lot of these things, but this is really taking it to the next level. It's combining a ton of images. Most of them are underexposed.

To save the highlights- and it also takes one that is overexposed to bring back the shadows and when I first took some of these photos, my impression was that they felt a little flat like it took a bit of the contrast away, and I wasn't really loving it, but once I started editing them. I really noticed that it brings back a lot of detail that you couldn't recover with the older phones, but you should be aware that, with all this computational photography, there is some room for weirdness. This is something I saw in the Google Pixel too, as well, when it's doing really extreme dynamic range pushes it'll make a kind of over filtered image. That kind of looks like a painting. It looks too fake if you notice the start to happen.

Tapping on the screen and adjusting the exposure can really help resolve it, or I'll probably find myself using third-party apps a little more often in these extreme situations. Just so I can force the camera to do exactly what I wanted to portrait mode is a feature. I didn't end up using a lot in my iPhone 10. That's probably because I have bigger cameras that can do depth of field for real, but I realize most users don't, and so the effect that they get out of here can make it look like you're using a much more expensive camera. That's really cool Apple's made some advancements in their depth mapping so that they can see more of how faraway subjects are, and this is led to a much more beautiful and realistic, both or blur.

In the background of the photo. However, the way it cuts out the subject is similar, and it'll still make mistakes round ears and glasses and hair I'm really curious to see how the iPhone 10 R is doing this, because it's doing with the single lens similar to what the Google Pixel was doing, and I was kind of surprised. They couldn't do that as well on the iPhone 10, yes like, why isn't it able to use the wide-angle lens and just do wide-angle portrait mode? I? Guess we're going to need to wait and see about that. Low-Light is where I saw some of the most impressive changes in this camera, but before we look at that, I've got to tell you this video is brought to you by audible, and I've, been using audible forever I. Don't know exactly how long it's been, but I just check and have 295 books in my library.

Audible has always been one of the most valuable resources for me and learning about new ideas and having time to go through literature which I definitely don't have time to read on my own I need somebody else to create it. For me, the best thing is that I spend almost all of my time that I'm editing photos also listening to audio content, so I'm able to absorb way more, and I've got a few recommendations if you're interested in Apple I'm about to finish small, fried by ELISA Brennan Jobs, who is Steve Jobs his daughter, it's a unique perspective on a story that I thought I already knew, and the next one I'm about to read is creative selection by Ken Cash End. It's all about being a software engineer inside of Apple during those golden years when Steve Jobs was making his come back. So to start your 30-day exclusive free trial and download a free book of your choice, go to audible. com, slash, Stall man or text Stall man to 500, 500 and honestly check out.

Either of these books have been fantastic, the sun's gone down. Let's do some low light tests in darker environments. This new sensor really shines, and you can see how much better the iPhone 10s camera has really gotten. Even before I zoom into the image. I can see that there's way more dynamic range and the brightest parts of the image like inside windows at night, but then, when I zoom in I, can see that there's also way more detail being preserved, and this isn't just sharpening being added to the photo.

This is sensor detail. This is additional data that we wouldn't have without these camera improvements. This is the image quality race right now from full-frame DSLR is down to phones. They all need better high ISO performance in more dynamic range and the iPhone 10 s has both overall we're seeing a real jump in image quality here, especially if you're upgrading from an iPhone 7 or an iPhone 6s you're going to see a significant difference, but I kind of expected that, like two or three years, is a normal upgrade and cameras would get better over that time. So I'm impressed that it is actually a little better than iPhone 10.

That I would even notice that difference, and now I'm excited is the iPhone 10 R, which looks like it's gonna, be incredible: image: quality for a lower price. So for more information about that, and photography in general go to Stall man podcast comm we're going to go into way more detail about all these things and don't forget to go check out Brandon. How hard he's got a video that we shot that same day. Thanks for watching you.

Source : Tyler Stalman