Accidental Tech Podcast656: A Long T-Shirt
https://atp.fm/656
The iPhone event! Reactions and analysis of the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and Air; the Apple Watch Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3; and the AirPods Pro 3.
Sean Harding@atpfm I think you guys are too easy on Apple with respect to how they talk about the cameras. "Optical quality" and using the term "lens" for digital zoom ratios is veering *very* close to deceptive, IMHO. As nerds we can read between the lines, but normal people won't.
Niek van de Pas
Jeremy Kanter@niekvdpas Past 5x, your 16 Pro is getting to 12 MP by upscaling. Not too different than taking a small image into Photoshop and using “image size” to make it larger.
With the new 48 MP sensor, the 4x lens is able to capture a 12 MP image at 8x just by using the pixels in the center. In other words, cropping rather than scaling.
@niekvdpas In other words, your 16 Pro is making up pixels, while the 17 Pro is actually capturing them. The 17 Pro’s image is going to look a lot better. (And that’s before we even get to the fact that the 17 Pro has a physically larger sensor.)
(Also worth noting that this is also how the 48 MP 1x/2x lens has worked for the last few generations.)
Stuart McHattie 👨🏼💻@niekvdpas @sharding @atpfm the 8x at 12MP on your 16 Pro is the 5x camera with a 12MP sensor using software to effectively expand the pixels in the middle of the image back up to 12MP. It’s inventing the values of some of the pixels because there simply weren’t enough sensor pixels to capture 12MP at that resolution.
In contrast, the 17 Pro has a 48MP sensor behind that 4x camera. This allows them to ignore the outer 36MP of the sensor; take a crop from the central 12MP and get an 8x image where every pixel in the photo was given data from a real sensor pixel. This is far better quality at 8x than your 16 Pro can do.