10 months later – is the Huawei Pura X still worth buying? 🤔📱
In my long-term review I revisit camera performance, battery health, software updates, durability & real daily usage after 10 months. No hype — just honest long-term experience.
Watch here:
youtu.be/G2JFk7OMzPQ
#Huawei #PuraX #LongTermReview #SmartphoneReview #LLTechview
Is there some site that the cool kids know about where I can find only #longtermreview s? I want to know how people feel about X after living with it a good long time; having it break, fixing it, getting to know the quirks and workarounds.
Trying to get the gumption up to start posting some :) Be the change and all that...
I’ve …
Our winter tires are on! #review
Can #Nokian Help Our #fordf150lightning Get A Grip In Cold Weather? #longtermreview
https://youtu.be/GfJulXg38aQ
Profoto B2 Long-Term Review: A Small Flash That Punches Above Its Weight
The Profoto B2 is a small, seemingly-"underpowered" light that was released back in 2015 and that has been with me for the past two years. Having bought it used and taken it on trips, shot in-studio, and photographed on-location, there are a lot of good things to say about it.
For everything from portraits of politicians, to fashion models, to still life, this light has been on every shoot. The Profoto B2 has delivered time and time again, despite the relatively low power.
You may be wondering why I would purchase a used light, especially given that flash tubes tend to wear out. That's absolutely a valid question -- it can be hit and miss. However, with buying used gear, one big problem is addressed: depreciation. The vast majority of photography equipment will depreciate in value rather instantly if purchased new. Purchased used, the value isn't lost nearly as quickly.
High-end equipment tends to retain price very well on the used market. More often than not, used gear can be sold for no less than 5-10% of the used price it was bought for (if you are done using it within a reasonable time).
When looking at the spec sheet, it may be disappointing to learn that the Profoto B2 can only provide 250W of power across two asymmetrical sockets. Nonetheless, the system is very portable, and having a flash head instead of a monobloc makes handling the whole setup lighter and recycling times faster. When working on location, assistants don’t get as tired, and in the studio, the unit recycles very quickly.
Overall, the Profoto B2 is a capable light that should be considered for purchase.
Design and Build Quality
Profoto is known for its reliable lights. This applies not only to their top-range equipment such as the ProHeads but also to lower-end products such as the B2. The Profoto B2 is a baby pack and head system that performs no worse than the bigger pack and head.
The B2 Head
The heads are lightweight and compact, coming in at 1.5 pounds (700g). They are the standard Profoto mount diameter, measuring 4×3.9×3.9 inches (10.3x10x10cm). It fits inside a camera backpack without a problem.
If the light stand mount is unscrewed from the head, it becomes even more compact. The head itself features an umbrella shaft and can mount all Profoto light shaping tools and accessories, though it is not recommended that you mount anything larger than a 3-foot Octa or 3×4-foot softbox.
It does accept the Umbrella Deep XL without a problem, though. In fact, I boomed the mentioned umbrella without a problem, although it can of course slide. This light can even be used with the large Giant reflectors, though you will lose some light due to the recessed flash tube.
The head is not fan-cooled but it doesn’t need active cooling because of the relatively low power that it produces. The cable is only about 6.6 feet (2m) long (or… short?), which can be a problem if there is a need to use two heads at the same time. A must-have for many photographers using the B2 would be an extension cable.
In terms of build quality, the head is well-made and has survived a few accidents, it feels and acts like a professional workhorse, which it is. The joint which holds the head is also very stable, even with relatively heavy modifiers on booms.
The B2 Pack
The pack is very light, coming in at 2.2 pounds (1.6kg) with the battery, which makes it a perfect on-location solution. In fact, the pack is so light assistants can carry it on their shoulders without any stress. The pack is only 6.3×3.1×6.7 inches (16x8x17cm) large, which enables it to fit in most camera bags without a problem.
The bag that the pack ships with can be used to hang it on a light stand and not worry about kicking the pack. However, even if the pack does get hit, it will probably be okay because of the high build quality that Profoto has.
There are a few dials on the pack that control various functions. The two big dials that control the power output from each socket turn very easily which can be a problem when trying to dial in power precisely. The power sockets have flaps on them which prevent dust and muck from getting in the important bits, but you must know that this pack isn’t water-resistant.
There are three ways to trigger the flash: with the IR socket, a sync cord, and AirTLL. Having used all three, I prefer AirTTL because of the ease of use. Profoto Air is reliable, from my own experience, there haven't been any misfires.
Internals
Air
The pack doesn’t have too many features if you compare it to alternative units. You can pick from 8 Air channels and 5 groups. Each socket can be set do a different group making the pack fully asymmetrical. 250W of power can be distributed in any ratio between the two sockets.
HSS and 2nd Curtain Sync
The ridiculously expensive Profoto Air Remote TTL will enable photographers to enjoy added features such as HSS and 2nd curtain sync. The Profoto HSS is different from the regular HSS other brands offer. Although HSS isn't a reliable or consistent way to produce images, I have used it on several occasions where there was no other choice.
What sets the Profoto HSS apart is that it creates a series of short flash bursts instead of using the long “tail” of the flash output curve. HSS enables using wider apertures, even in broad sunlight. Add TTL to the mix and a very easy-to-use and reliable on-location setup is created.
TTL
When it came out, the photography community went bananas and said that adding TTL to such professional products is a waste of time. I may not be the most professional photographer, but I’ve used Profoto TTL when shooting a secretary of state and it didn’t fail me. It is a convenient way to get good exposure when you only have a few shots.
I mainly use TTL on-location but it does work in the studio too. For me, it is a faster way to get to the fun part of photography, that part isn’t setting light power. Consistency may not be the best with TTL, but that doesn’t worry me too much since I’m not using TTL when I need spot-on consistency.
Light Quality
The B2 provides 250W of power in total. If you are shooting portraits on location, you are likely to only require one head with a medium umbrella. That amount of power is more than enough to light a person in a way that is natural and not “flashy”.
Some photographers seem to be focused on overpowering the sun (possibly to show off what their equipment can do), but that can sometimes look unnatural and can make the resulting image look cheap. If there is a need to get extra power from your B2, add a Magnum reflector, which gives 2 more stops of light, making the B2 the equivalent of a 1000W unit.
In the studio, a single B2 can be used for fill and key. All of the imagery in this article has been shot with the B2 and nothing else.
The B2 is just enough in the studio. If the B2 is used for doing still life, the low power is a benefit as it can be used to control light with precision. The B2 is great as a bounced light too because it provides enough power to fill a medium-sized room. Clearly, one can’t really say that it’s an underpowered light.
Let’s talk about other important properties: consistency, recycle time, and flash duration.
Power-wise, the pack can deliver very consistent results with little power variation from shot to shot. Photographers would have no problem shooting eCommerce with the B2 and expecting the same exposure from shot to shot.
Temperature is fairly consistent from shot to shot but does shift a bit across the whole power range. It will shift approximately 1000K in normal mode and 2000K in Freeze mode. This isn’t great news and Profoto could’ve done a better job at making this pack more consistent.
Recycling times are blazingly fast, only 1.35s at full power. This makes the B2 fit for action shooting.
The battery life is okay, but not great. Unfortunately, buying a few spare batteries will be needed if the B2 is going to be used for shooting on location without a power source nearby. Still, even after years of use, the battery can pump out at least 170-200 full-power flashes.
The modeling lamp isn’t anything special. A little 7W LED is all you have. It is either on or off. It would be great to see a variable and more powerful LED in the pack. It isn't a surprise that the modeling lamp isn't powerful, however, that is expected from a light this small. LEDs have gone a long way now, so the B2 is not up-to-date and would not be good for most video work.
The flash duration on the B2 is simply incredible. It is enough to freeze motion, even at high power. It's actually marginally better than the Profoto B1X.
Read also : Profoto B10X and B10X Plus Review: A New Bar for Compact Powerful Strobes
A Great Way To Get Into the Profoto Ecosystem
All in all, the Profoto B2 is an affordable, versatile, and compact little flash that is a great way to dip your toes in the Profoto ecosystem of lighting equipment.
Are There Alternatives?
There are alternatives. Just as with every review of Profoto, the alternative is Godox (AKA Flashpoint and PixaPro) or a different unit from Profoto.
Profoto B10X is a more modern alternative for the B2. It will be more expensive, but it will also support AirX, have a shorter flash duration, and be more compact.
The AD200 will give out a little less power (200W), recycle considerably slower (1.8s), and accept very few modifiers if you don’t buy an adapter. But, it will provide 500 full-power flashes on one charge, cost $350, and be considerably smaller.
The AD300 will give a little more power, accept Bowens-mount modifiers, and have a slightly longer battery life (300 flashes). But it will recycle slower (1.5s), have a longer flash duration (1/220s), as well as have worse build quality. It will cost you $500 to purchase.
Overall, the alternatives are worth considering if the photographer is already in a different ecosystem or wants similar light output for less money. It is possible to get several Godox units for the same price as a used Profoto B2 system.
Should You Buy It?
If you are considering making the switch to Profoto, this is a great entry point. The light can be used both in-studio and on-location. It is lightweight, relatively cheap on the used market, and made to the same standard as the big ProHead+ProPack systems. In my opinion, this light is worth purchasing for everyone interested in upgrading their basic light equipment.
The Profoto B2 AirTTL On-Location kit can be purchased for around $700 to $900 in the used market -- just keep your eyes peeled.
#equipment #lighting #reviews #b2 #flash #illyaovchar #longtermreview #profotob2 #review #strobe
The DSLR I Am Not Retiring: A Long-Term Review of Canon 5D Mark IV
Released in 2016, the Canon 5D Mark IV got a range of reviews, with most being quite negative. 5 years down the road, how does this camera hold up in professional jobs, and will I be upgrading from it?
Last year, just before things got slightly out of hand, I upgraded from a 5D Mark II to a 5D Mark IV. As a fashion photographer who still shot events for a living, I was seeking an upgrade for two reasons: more resolution, higher ISO, dual card slots.
In the Canon ecosystem, the 5D Mark IV was the most reasonable camera. Come pandemic, I lost all my event work and decided to sack off that branch completely, as I had been meaning to for some time. Having shot all sorts of work on the 5D Mark IV and having seen how it performed for me, I am prepared to share my thoughts on this camera. (Spoiler: it’s a great camera.)
I must point out that I’m not a technical photographer, and I probably won’t be pixel-peeping and discussing niche details. So far, I bought gear that I needed to get my job done, and not because I might need it to get a job done.
The first item on my list was decent zoom lenses that could do f/2.8. While it took me several years to get to, I first invested in glass, only then came the good bodies. At the moment, I own three lenses: a 16-35mm f/2.8 II, a 24-70mm f/2.8 I, and a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS I. As you can see, I don’t chase the latest and the greatest -- I chase only the bare minimum I need to confidently do my work.
Overview
I saw the upgrade to a 5D Mark IV as a leap to new horizons. It was better in every way than a 5D Mark II, and this was truly an upgrade I wanted for quite some time. The camera had plenty of new features and improvements that made it incredibly well suited for shooting events, especially in low-light. The improved resolution was great for cropping, ergonomics made it well suited for my large hands, and the viewfinder never failed to warn me that I’m doing something wrong.
The camera is also built very well, and despite me using it in the nastiest conditions, it’s holding up. I had it dropped, soaked, and abused. So far, it’s fine and I hope it stays that way. The shutter count is approaching a milestone of 100,000. Soon, I will be adding a 5DS to my arsenal, as beauty work requires extra resolution.
The Good
The 5D series is quite special to me in general. My first big milestone job was shot on a 5D camera. The 5D Mark II, which gave me fond memories showed me that it was built to be a workhorse. The 5D Mark IV builds on that incredible legacy. It offers great build quality, with the body feeling solid. The magnesium alloy that it’s made out of survived many dings, and large crashes. So far, the only part I had to replace was the hot-shoe. If you have a screwdriver, it’s a 10-minute repair.
Colors
Color reproduction is quite important for my work. While I pay close attention to skin tones, I like all other colors also being true to what they are. Having done extensive beauty work on it, it does a pretty good job with keeping tones, as well as offering color depth (24.8 bit). The 13.6 EVF dynamic range means I can have plenty of detail even in the most unusual conditions. That deteriorates with higher ISO, but I found that anything shot up to ISO 6400 is very solid and can go on medium-sized print, and most digital.
I’ve had to take portraits at ISO 6400, and they were fine. Anything beyond ISO 6400 is not usable in my eyes. There are inconsistencies. The only use I’d see for this camera at high ISO is at press work that will be in black and white. A general tip would be to go for B&W when you're at a high ISO.
Connectivity
As I work with a team most of the time, tethering is huge for me. Luckily the USB 3.0 port has no problem delivering images to Capture One at great speed. This is huge for me, as I had some speed issues with the Mark II.
Other connectivity features are somewhat irrelevant to me. I only used the WiFi function when I wanted to post something to an Instagram story quickly. I never had to use NFC and found the GPS a bit redundant too. The HDMI port was handy with external monitors, and the microphone jack also helped me get cleaner audio. The PC sync port is a bit dated, but I used it once with a gnarly flash setup where I mixed a number of brands.
Autofocus
The autofocus on this camera is second to none. The same module is used on the flagship 1D X series built for action sports photography. The autofocus system has plenty of points, which get it tack-sharp 99% of the time. If you know what you’re doing, 100%. The continuous autofocus in the video was also a nice addition. I am awful when it comes to focus-pulling, much of the videos I shot on it relied on that continuous video autofocus.
Video
Speaking of video: I wish I shot more of it. So far, the only times I did video work on the 5D Mark IV was on rescheduled events. Even then, the camera was used for both: stills and video. The custom mode on the main dial made that process incredibly easy to do, and the low-light performance ensured I got decent results no matter the venue.
Ease of Use
When it first arrived, I didn’t have any trouble with getting to know it. The leap from the 5D Mark II was very easy. Luckily, most buttons stayed where they were. The of/off switch right by the mode dial was very welcomed.
The feature I was most excited about was the ability to customize it to my liking. The AF-on button will toggle AI-Servo mode for me, while the m-fn (conveniently near the shutter) will change the ISO.
The touchscreen seemed useless, but I love it. This helped me be more efficient, and adapt to sceneries a lot faster. For me, a sign of good gear is not having to open the manual ever. With the 5D Mark IV, that is the case.
The Bad
This camera has been incredibly good to me, but it has its flaws. I must say that none of them are critical when it comes to most work. They are nice additions.
Articulating Screen
The biggest one for me is the lack of it. This is nothing compared to not having live-view at all (like in my first DSLR) but still, an articulating screen would be a nice touch.
Lacking Video Features
Another turnoff is the lack of video features. I remember having focus peaking on the 5D Mark II and being able to pull off okay focus. Probably with focus peaking, I would be doing more video work as it makes life a lot easier. I am looking forward to seeing a Magic Lantern release for the 5D Mark IV -- it’s been in the works for some time now.
Selective Spot-Metering
A nice feature to have would be spot-metering for a selected autofocus point. This is mostly applicable to concert photography where everything bar the subject is dark.
What’s Next?
I am not retiring my 5D Mark IV until it breaks. And even then, I might just get another used one and stick to it. The Mark IV is a great camera that can be used for pretty much any genre of photography. I am going to purchase a 5DS soon, as I need more resolution, and don’t really care about ISO.
Why not the Canon R5? Because I have to buy two of them if I decide to invest in the R5. That amounts to $8,000, which my business is not ready to take on. But that's already a whole other topic.
About the author : Illya Ovchar is a commercial and editorial fashion photographer based in Budapest. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Ovchar's work on his website and Instagram.
#equipment #reviews #5dmark4 #5dmarkiv #5dmk4 #camera #canon #canon5dmarkiv #dslr #gear #illyaovchar #longtermreview #review #tips
A Long-Term Review of the iPhone 12 Camera
I use my phone like most people. I scroll through my social media feeds, order from overpriced delivery apps, and even make the occasional phone call. But in 2021, there’s one feature alone that decides how much I’ll spend on a phone: the camera.
I take photos. At times, I do it professionally, but most of the time I do it because I absolutely love photography. I’ve used (and even reviewed) a lot of cameras. I figured: why not review the iPhone 12… purely as a camera?
The iPhone 12 launched four and a half months ago, to a flash flood of reviews. When you only have a week with a review unit, even with the best synthetic photography benchmarks, you end up with a first impression. Smart cameras call for real-world trials to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Over the last four months, I’ve taken my iPhone to deserts and snow, mounted it on motorcycles, hiked into the wilderness, and gone swimming with it. I was left with a lot of photos and some interesting findings, and I’m excited to present a real-world review of the iPhone 12 lineup.
iPhones 12
Fall 2020 saw four new iPhones with differences ranging in size, features, and finish:
I’m privileged to work on a camera app, as we have to acquire every variant of every iPhone model each year. This review will focus on the two extremes: the iPhone 12 Pro Max and its tiny cousin, the iPhone 12 mini.
It’s easy to fall into the mistake of grading and comparing an iPhone on its year-over-year improvements. Most people do not upgrade their phone every year. Similarly, it’s not great to benchmark an iPhone against a full-frame professional digital camera.
Stiff competition? Perhaps.
A 40+ megapixel, full-frame sensor camera will win against an iPhone in hardware-based image quality. That’s just physics. What the cameras in our phones are fighting for, however, is a total equation where good enough meets ease of use, flexibility, and portability.
If I’m going on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I’ll carry along a big camera. If I’m getting married, I’ll hire a professional photographer with a big camera. But what about a weeklong vacation? Watching your children growing up? Practicing photography, and observing the ebbs and flows of everyday life? I find myself carrying cameras less, and shooting with my iPhone more.
It’s a Hard(ware) Thing
Almost every modern camera refresh is one part evolutionary, and one part revolutionary. Hardware tends to evolve, with incremental sensor and lens improvements. Short of a surprise breakthrough in hardware, companies focus on revolutionary software to make the most of light gathered in sensors.
We dove into the hardware changes when the iPhone 12 launched, but it’s worth a quick recap.
The baseline iPhone 12 camera is truly a slight evolution. The main camera (we’ll call it ‘wide’) has a slightly larger aperture, moving from f1.8 to f1.6. That works out to 27% more light than the previous generation. Meanwhile, the Max-sized phone saw a larger evolutionary leap (so to speak) with a 47% larger sensor. Apple chose to not add megapixels on this bigger sensor, but pack in larger photo-sites, which makes for better low-light photography. Apple claims an 87% improvement in light collection, and it sure looks it.
This larger wide-angle camera includes a sensor-shift-based stabilization system. While other iPhones move the lens when stabilizing the shot, the 12 Pro Max moves the entire sensor assembly for better stabilization. It’s like the world’s tiniest gimbal.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max also received a 65mm equivalent telephoto lens, the longest lens ever put in an iPhone. This enables sharper shots of faraway subjects, but it’s a subtle improvement over last year’s 52mm. Prior “Pro” models ranged from 26mm to 52mm — you might know this as 1x to 2x — and the 12 Pro Max’s 26mm to 65mm equals 1x to 2.5x.
The presence of any sort of telephoto lens is the most obvious difference between the Pro and Non-Pro iPhones. If you have an on an older generation iPhone with a telephoto camera, and you’re tempted to downsize to an iPhone 12 Mini for the ergonomics, David Smith has a great check for whether you’ll miss it. Create a smart album in your Photos app, and quickly scan for images taken with the telephoto lens.
I’m trying out the XR, but was curious how much I’ll actually miss the telephoto lens.
I realized I can check using a smart album in Photos on the Mac. For me the telephoto was used in only 16% of my iPhone X photos. pic.twitter.com/N3YRjp4cFL
-- David Smith (@_DavidSmith) October 29, 2018
It turns out about half of my photos on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max are taken with that longer lens.
I think it’s the telephoto lens— not the larger sensor, faster aperture, or even ProRAW— that makes the iPhone 12 Pro Max the photographer’s phone. You are forced to be creative; to choose what’s in the shot. You can make a background loom dramatically, capture flattering portraits, and take some distance from your subjects. The Max’s telephoto camera is now blessed with a sensor that has quite a nice output and even supports ProRAW.
Manual focus with the telephoto lens makes it even more fun, with its beautiful, ‘natural’ bokeh. There’s even more of it now with the slightly larger aperture. (You need an app like Halide to use manual focus)
Lake Tahoe at sunset shot on iPhone 12 Pro Max, wide vs. telephoto.
Sadly, the telephoto camera remains the only camera on your iPhone that doesn’t support Night Mode. These beefy new iPhones still just crop part of your Wide camera image and pass that off as a capture from your telephoto lens. Even the Ultra-wide lens now supports Night Mode. I really hope we’ll see this done ‘properly’ in the next iPhone.
The Pipeline
If there’s any hardware revision to be excited about year over year, it’s not the camera, but the processor and memory of your new iPhone. Apple makes the fastest mobile chips hands-down, which unlock new tricks to create images previously impossible in sensors the size of your thumbnail.
Apple now actively markets their smart photography pipeline. They give brand names to algorithms, like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion. These complex technologies use all the power of the latest chipsets, such as real-time machine learning that selectively enhance details in areas, guesses white balance in night shots, detects subjects, and more. It’s no exaggeration to say that the iPhone 12 is the smartest camera Apple has built yet. Does it result in a better shot?
For casual photography, yes. Earlier generations (cough, iPhone XS) struggled to retain detail after aggressive ‘smart’ noise reduction. Apple’s new smart technologies generate much more natural images. Whether it’s people or animals, detail is retained in skin and hair.
Contrast this with the many Android phones that enable problematic effects like skin-smoothing, by default. Making automatic ‘enhancement’ of your image opt-out sets a scary precedent.
Will future phones make you skinnier, and give you bigger eyes? Our ideals of beauty matter, and while photography is subjective, an automatic ‘lens’ on the most-used cameras of our time will greatly affect society and those in it, especially impressionable young humans. I have no doubt that Apple considered ‘beautifying’ effects to remain competitive, but I’m happy to see them remain absent.
While the iPhone does a lot of processing, it’s conservative in its… editorial decisions. It’s not afraid to let you take a bad photo: color saturation and contrast are fairly neutral, with its white balance skewing towards taking warmer images. I don’t mind that: I think that’s a ‘look’ that we’ve come to expect from Apple.
Blue-tint in fairly ‘neutral’ skies is a telltale of iPhone 12 image processing. It just loves a good blue sky, even if the sky you captured wasn’t particularly blue that day. This was a classic, grey Amsterdam sky when shot.
The only time that I found the smart image processing on the iPhone noticeably bothersome is when skies get overly tinted blue. It’s clear that the iPhone can now easily detect and segment the sky in a shot, and it applies nice smooth noise reduction to it to get wonderful gradients. But even cloudy skies tend to get a blue cast that isn’t as neutral as you’d like.
Meanwhile, some Android phones make such aggressive changes that they’re accused of adding a fake moon.
Low Light
iPhone 12 collects more light, so it takes nice photos when the sun starts to set. I found that I got a lot less noise in my RAW files and more detail in my non-RAW files quite consistently. Once the sun goes below the horizon, the camera app can also manage to take photos without Night mode. The benefit to this is more detail (less noise reduction), and the ability to take low-light Live Photos.
It’s not really news that the iPhone 12 is the best low-light camera Apple has built yet. With the introduction of Night mode, Apple brought a very robust computational-photography-based long exposure option to the masses (I love a good computational long exposure tool).
You’ll find that you can take Night mode shots on the new iPhones in surprisingly dark conditions. Coming from an iPhone that lacked night mode can be kind of mind-blowing, and even larger digital cameras will feel some envy seeing an iPhone do hand-held ’10 second exposures’.
Handheld 10-second exposure. A smaller portable camera wouldn’t have gotten this shot.
I add quotes there because while Apple gives you a nice duration setting, it always attempts to get a sharp shot. Night Mode is a classic Apple solution: ease of use through no real configurability. Getting light trails or soft effects is impossible, as it prioritizes getting a ‘sharp frame’ and then stacking additional detail onto it.
You can, however, let the iPhone get steady enough on a surface (hey, the sides are flat now) or on a tripod to select an exposure time of up to 30 seconds.
In a pitch-black night moonless night in New Mexico, that can get some really impressive shots:
Here are 10, 15, and 30-second exposures with an iPhone 12 Pro on Night Mode. This is impressive!
10-second exposure 15-second exposure 30-second exposure
Now, does this stack up against a larger camera yet? I wouldn’t say so. What is harming Night Mode the most for serious photography is its inflexibility. Support for ProRAW helps a lot — that adds more detail and adjustability to the heavily processed output.
But as developers of a camera app, we’d love to have a Night Mode API to add options like how much frame blending is done, what level of noise reduction is applied, and more. Doing a ‘true’ long exposure like this:
This is the only image in this review not taken on the iPhone 12. Taken with a Leica M with 35mm Summilux lens. A ‘true’ 15 second long exposure. Night mode is impressive, but can’t achieve results like this.
Is just not possible right now as the iPhone will optimize to get those cars sharp. That makes perfect sense: Night Mode is optimized for most people, who will likely take photos of friends in a dim restaurant, or the moon over the city. You want sharp shots. But as always, taking away options to make a feature accessible and easy to use also comes at an expense of utility to those that are pursuing creative options beyond what the camera prescribes.
Let’s hope for a Night Mode API in the future.
LIDAR and You
iPhone 12 Pro has a particularly interesting looking shape on its camera mesa which does not protrude, unlike its camera lenses. Underneath this opaque reflective disk lives a sensor that does something very cool. It senses depth.
The LIDAR sensor debuted in the 2020 iPad Pro. Under that disc on the iPhone 12 Pro lives a similar, but slightly smaller unit. These sensors work by emitting light in a pattern of dots and measuring the time it takes for a photon from these dots to reflect off a surface and travel back to the sensor. You’ll also see these sensors referred to as ‘Time-of-Flight’ sensors for this reason, and it’s not just you — this is absolutely mind-blowing technology. Light travels very fast: these sensors are kind of a miracle.
In operation, it looks something like this (the LIDAR sensor projects a fairly wide-spaced dot pattern that covers your subject):
And if you were to be on the receiving end, something like this (what ‘you’ see when you are being blasted with the LIDAR):
The pattern of dots exactly fits the coverage of the iPhone’s ‘wide’ camera, to speed up autofocus. This is very useful in low light, when autofocus scans for whether your subject is close or far away. Normally, a camera looks for sharp edges to figure out focus, which is difficult in low light. With LIDAR, it instantly senses the subject’s distance, allowing you to shoot right away.
This is similar to how the Face ID (or ‘TrueDepth’) sensor housed the iPhone “notch” works. Here’s FaceID in action, shot in infrared:
Unlike FaceID, LIDAR fires its ‘dots’ once per second when in regular camera modes, and even when recording video. In portrait mode, it fires much faster. The intensity of the projected light is quite intense; in the above video, the LIDAR dots are about as intense on the subject as a car headlight. This is likely so it works in daylight.
You can test LIDAR’s efficacy easily: just cover it with your finger. You’ll notice it doesn’t make a huge difference in daytime. At times, it’s even a hindrance, as the LIDAR beams reflect and scatter off transparent surfaces. Shooting out of an airplane window or through a sliding glass door sometimes makes your iPhone slow to focus, as it confuses transparent surfaces with opaque ones. When that happens, just cover the dot with your finger, and your iPhone will fall back to conventional focus based on edges in the image.
The iPhone 12 Pro’s LIDAR sensor is designed to map things at a large scale, and in motion. This is very evident with the prototype app we built for the iPad Pro: when moved, the LIDAR sensor will work to map a sort of 3D mesh of its environment. With some machine learning and data from the cameras, it can turn this into a fairly crude 3D model of say, a room. It can map features like tables, doorways, and windows OK. It’s far too crude for say, 3D scanning smaller objects, though.
LIDAR-Powered Portrait Mode
In Apple’s announcement event, the LIDAR feature was hailed as something usable for a new dual-mode computational trick: Portrait mode Night mode — or Night mode Portrait mode, if you prefer. (Apple officially calls it ‘Night mode Portrait’)
Night mode combines several images to get a crisp shot in low light; Portrait mode uses multiple cameras to create a depth map that can let the iPhone assess its distance from various regions in the image to create a somewhat convincing shallow depth of field effect. There are two significant challenges for the camera here: determining what is in focus and generating a good map of depth in the shot.
I am perhaps unique in that I barely ever use Portrait mode. I just don’t find myself enjoying it. Too frequently, the effect of Portrait mode is still too artificial-looking, and I’m not a huge fan of the camera restricting it when I am too close or far from my subject.
For the sake of this review, I tested the latest Portrait mode on a few shoots and got a few shots that I was happy with:
Portrait mode hasn’t really been my favorite way to shoot, but it’s undeniably gotten a lot better since its inception in iPhone 7 Plus.
How does it stack up? It’s still not as nice as a ‘proper’ camera, but far more flexible than having to tote around a big camera and lens for a similar shot:
Portrait mode doesn’t seem very optimized for shooting objects that aren’t people or pets, so you’ll find that it occasionally just doesn’t blur parts of the scene. That makes it challenging to use for creative setups like the shot above, where it will simply not blur the foreground.
It stacks up great against other phones, though: Even without LIDAR, Portrait mode on the iPhone 12 mini is significantly better than previous generation iPhones. If you are coming from an iPhone XS or X, it’s a major leap. The ability to adjust depth (in real-time or after the shot) is great, and Portrait Lighting creates more flattering portraits even in bad light.
In the past, the Portrait AI would improperly mask parts of your image, leaving segments of your image sharp or blurry when they shouldn’t. This jarring mistake seems much rarer.
Initially, I hadn’t tested Portrait + Night mode very much. In the few tests I did, though — comparing it to a regular camera and the iPhone 12 mini, which is unequipped with a LIDAR sensor, it works outrageously well:
The iPhone 12 mini or other iPhones will simply give up at night: the iPhone 12 Pro Max has no problem with it at all.
This is also a testament to the utter computational magic on display here.
The image on the right was taken on Sony’s latest and greatest full-frame camera, the A1. At wide-open (1.4) aperture, ISO 12800 and 1/15th of a second, it captured a decently usable shot in this very dark setting. That an iPhone can take a photo like that here is nothing short of incredible. LIDAR comes in clutch.
I can hear you wonder: “does this really use LIDAR that much?” and the answer, as tested with an infrared camera, is yes:
In very low light, the Night mode Portrait feature actually goes from rapid blinking to ‘holding’ the LIDAR projection for a moment at higher brightness to ensure it gets sharp frames and, presumably, a better depth map. I would imagine detecting depth with the two cameras is much harder when there isn’t enough light to really see any parallax.
So yes, LIDAR is definitely nice to have in this camera. In addition to being a better night-time portrait taker, the autofocus is actually quite fantastic if you’re shooting some action-y scenes. ProRAW or not, the iPhone doesn’t really take fast RAW shots, so getting sharp focus or action in focus is essential. The LIDAR sensor makes short work of focus when opening the camera to get a shot.
ProRAW
On that note, let’s talk about Apple ProRAW.
ProRAW came out a little after the iPhone 12 Pro Max and Mini hit the market. At Lux, we were quite excited when ProRAW came out, despite some worries from folks that we would be threatened in some form because the stock camera app would be getting some type of RAW capture.
A rising tide lifts all boats! Apple introducing a special1 RAW format for the iPhone camera means a commitment to RAW shooting, and the more people know about RAW, the more people might be interested in a better camera for iPhone.
We’ve previously written a lot about ProRAW — so if you want an explainer about RAW and how it works, and how ProRAW is unique I recommend reading that, followed by Austin Mann’s excellent article on it.
I will just touch on ProRAW and its capture experience here.
ProRAW is a powerful new tool in the iPhone photographer’s tool chest because it brings some of the ‘smarts’ of the iPhone camera pipeline to the flexible RAW format.
This is what we refer to when we talk about a ‘pipeline’. Apple’s iPhone camera image processing is extensive.
Smarts? Essentially, your iPhone takes many shots in rapid succession and intelligently blends them to fuse together a great shot. Some shots are under- and overexposed, to get more detail in the shadows and recover highlights. iOS also uses machine learning to identify areas that should get more or less noise reduction, to retain the most detail.
ProRAW goes to Tattooine. ProRAW selectively noise-reduced the sky here, and retained more detail in the rocks and bike.
One of the most mind-blowing examples of the ‘smart’ photography in the iPhone camera is that you’ve probably never actually taken a photo on your iPhone. The iPhone has done it for you.
The camera is essentially always taking photos when it is open, keeping a rolling buffer of shots. When you tap the shutter button, it can go back and grab a frame from right before you pressed the screen, giving the impression of a zero-shutter-lag camera. What’s more, because of the rolling buffer, it can quickly check several shots and choose the least shaky one when you’re moving to ensure you got the best shot.
To some, this feels a bit… wrong. You can’t quite place your finger on it, but it starts to enter an uncanny valley of sorts. At what point do you lose agency as a photographer? Is it you, or the camera that is calling the shots and making the creative choices?
Enter RAW. RAW files are often loved by photographers because they’re also (often) lossless and give you far more data than the typical output format of your camera (JPG or HEIC) which enables enormous freedom when editing your shot later.
The power of RAW: with additional information in highlights and shadows, you can capture those seductive poses of your friends the way you saw it, rather than the way the camera wanted to capture it.
But on iPhone, I really came to love RAW because it skips (almost) all of the processing and just gives you the image as it is. With RAW on iPhone, you take the photo, and there is no recombination of frames happening to get you a different result.
On iPhone XS, this was immensely beneficial — noise reduction on these cameras was aggressive and could really remove some detail. Since then, iPhone sensors have gotten bigger and better, which means less noise. But processing also increased, as cameras got smarter each year.
This iPhone 12 Pro RAW photo shows ‘natural’ noise. This is a regular native RAW, not ProRAW, which means it doesn’t benefit from the image pipeline’s noise reduction pass.
This year, RAW got smarter. ProRAW brings that advanced image pipeline — the merging of frames, selective detail enhancement, and more — to a virtually lossless, scene-referred format.
ProRAW output is excellent. While the ‘regular’ RAW files out of the iPhone 12 cameras are already excellent, with far lower noise than seen in previous cameras and tons of detail, the benefits of ProRAW shine when shooting in tricky conditions when available light would introduce a lot of noise to your shot, or when merged frames can give lots of extra dynamic range.
I don’t seem to be alone: in some quick polling on our Twitter, we found that most iPhone 12 Pro users opt for it, despite it being much slower to capture.
Only iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max get ProRAW, and not only because they have ‘Pro’ in the name. They have much more RAM than their unprofessional, less RAW-savvy siblings.
Note : It has to be mentioned that with an app like Halide, you can still shoot RAW on the non-Pro iPhone 12 and 12 mini to great effect — but even we developers cannot bring ProRAW to these phones.
ProRAW doesn’t end there: it brings RAW to modes and even cameras that do not normally support any type of RAW capture. The ultra-wide camera gets RAW, and so does Night mode.
ProRAW on iPhone 12 Pro’s ultra-wide camera allows much greater freedom when editing, but still shows some of the processing artifacts like heavy handed noise reduction.
ProRAW is an excellent tool to add to the iPhone camera, but like Night mode, it is somewhat lacking in flexibility. It can be aggressive in noise reduction, particularly when using a process like Deep Fusion which merges many frames to get a good result.
The Gripes
That’s all a very positive overall impression of the iPhone 12 series, but what remains a legitimate photographic issue on these phones?
Apart from inflexibility in the images you can capture — which is largely negated by apps like Halide that give you extra control — the iPhone suffers from a few camera issues that will probably be solved with upgraded hardware in the future.
UFOs near the border of New Mexico? No, just lens flares.
Flaring on the ultra-wide and wide cameras is not just noticeable, but outright bothersome when shooting into light. In the above image, you can see the telltale iPhone ‘green orb’ flare that is a result of internal reflections in the lens. This can be fairly unobtrusive as in that shot, but when shooting many bright point sources of light head-on, can outright ruin a shot.
I will give this to Apple: It’s very, very challenging to eliminate this in optics, but it’s still a nuisance when shooting on an iPhone.
Detail crop of iPhone 12 Pro Max’ wide camera. Regular RAW vs. ProRAW. Even in ProRAW, the iPhone’s noise reduction pipeline can suffer from very strong noise reduction resulting in a loss of detail.
Then there’s noise reduction.
Noise reduction is something I never really enjoyed on iPhones, and I find it really bothersome that ProRAW does not give granular control over how much is applied to a final image. When shooting in dark conditions with the iPhone’s less light-sensitive cameras, you can get muddled images that would’ve looked nicer with some grain. It’s almost like a watercolor painting:
Image shot on iPhone 12 Pro Max in ProRAW with the ultra-wide camera.
This looks fine at first glance, but even slightly zoomed in:
Ouch. I would’ve probably preferred the noise. Unfortunately there’s no way to see what that would’ve looked like, as native RAW is simply not available on the ultra-wide camera.
Conclusion
iPhone 12 is, at its core, a showcase of how much software really matters in cameras nowadays.
Five years ago, we would have likely looked at the camera improvements on the iPhone 12 by focusing on what is new under that camera bump. While an improvement in the lens is nice, we would’ve probably shrugged it off as a minor improvement. Evolution.
Apple did something smarter than trying to do the impossible with the limited space they had in the physical world: they spent a cycle refining, redesigning, and hugely investing in the software that gets more out of the cameras. What they achieved is truly impressive. But what I find equally impressive is the pitfall they avoided.
One of my dearest friends is a type designer. That means he designs typefaces for all sorts of things: he created the custom typeface we use in Halide, for instance. But he once had a job creating a family of typefaces for the local newspaper.
I asked him what truly defined success in the design of a typeface like that, and he just smiled at me and said, “when people don’t notice the typeface at all.”
Smart image processing, magical multi-frame combination, deep fusion, night mode: the best camera is the one that is not just on you, but gets out of the way. That takes a great photo, yet does this smart enough to make you feel like you actually took it. A camera that takes better photos but remains neutral — allowing the photographer the flexibility to edit it afterward to make it fit their mood and artistic vision.
Great cameras let you fail.
Apple largely succeeded in doing that. I have no doubt that the temptation for their camera team is immense: they have the most powerful chips in the industry, the greatest freedom to create a camera that can simply do no wrong: that can over-process any image to look good to most people.
Yet, the iPhone remains truthful. It’s a true tool for photographers while democratizing photography for a vast population with technologies that make challenging conditions easier to shoot in. It processes your images more, takes better photos for every user, and even offers substantial options for the pros — without sacrificing authenticity.
It’s a photographer’s phone. And it’s a great camera.
1 Based on open standards: ProRAW shoots into a regular DNG format, which is fantastic.
About the author : Sebastiaan de With is the co-founder and developer of Halide, a groundbreaking iPhone camera app for deliberate and thoughtful photography. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can connect with him on Twitter. This article was also published here.
#equipment #reviews #iphone #iphone12 #iphonecamera #longterm #longtermreview #review #sebastiaandewith
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