In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro. Quarantine had prompted McCabe, a mother of two, to invest more effort into documenting family life. She figured that the new smartphone, which had been released the month before and featured an enhanced camera, would improve the quality of her amateur snapshots. But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, “I feel a little duped.” Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl’s upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), “what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture.” The new iPhone promises “next level” photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. “Make it less smart—I’m serious,” she said. Lately, she’s taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google’s line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures.
Apple has reportedly sold more than a hundred million units of the iPhone 12 Pro, and more than forty million of the iPhone 13 Pro since it débuted, in September of last year. Both models are among the most popular consumer cameras ever made, and also among the most powerful. The lenses on our smartphones are tiny apertures, no bigger than a shirt button. Until recently, they had little chance of imitating the function of full-size professional camera lenses.
Sources
Litchfield, S. (2021, April 21). DSLR vs camera phone, 2021 - are we there, yet? All About Windows Phone. http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24202_DSLRvscameraphone2021-arewethe.php
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