iPhone 11 Pro Camera
For both the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro it’s all about the camera and the battery life. Both devices have been given an extra lens, bumping the single-lens shooter on the XR up to a dual-lens on the 11 and the dual-lens on the XS to a triple-lens. On the 11 Pro and Pro Max it makes for a somewhat awkward-looking square bump on the back of the device but the improvements are well worth it.
The iPhone 11 has a 12-megapixel wide and a 12-megapixerl ultra wide lens. The former gives an apterture of f/1.8 while the latter boasts f/2.4. The Pro versions have the same lenses augmented with a telephoto lens offering an aperture of f/2.0. That means that while the 11 has 2x optical zoom out and 5x digital zoom, the Pro can manage 2x optical zoom in and out as well as 10x digital zoom. What does that all mean in practice? Well, the pictures look really, really good and you can do some really cool stuff with them. Check out the images below to see the three different lenses in action.
Other developments include Portrait mode, which now has advanced bokeh and Depth Control. Apple says it’s more accurate and you can control the amount of blurring in the background for those artistic selfies. On the 11 Pro, you can activate a new editing tool called ‘High-Key Light Mono’ that converts any background to white and the subject to black and white.
The video capabilities of the iPhone 11 Pro are also breathtaking. It can capture stabilised 4K footage at up to 60fps and slow-mo footage at 120fps. You can flip betweent the three lenses on the 11 Pro without intercepting your video. And, because Apple has added some more editing tools to iOS 13, you can rotate, crop and apply filters all within the phone itself. Apple is rightly proud of a new feature called Night Mode which finally lets the iPhone match Google’s Pixel devices when it comes to low-light photography. The mode is triggered automatically when the light drops low enough and it takes a series of photos and uses a process called adaptive bracketing to pull out as much detail as possible. Some of the photos have shorter shutter speeds and some have longer ones, it factors in the shake of your hand and then optimises the shot to brightened shadows. The whole process takes between 3-5 seconds and the difference is, well, night and day.
Apple has also added a feature called ‘semantic rendering’ which computerises the photographic process to create the best results. The phone will actually start taking photos once you open the app, so when you’ve hit the shutter it’s already got images cached. It grabs four underexposed shots and one overexposed one and works to define aspects of the images: faces, hair, the sky – things like that. It then uses all that information to sharpen and define hair, for example, but also smooths out the sky. It also uses the different pictures to adjust shadows and brightness automatically to try and give you the most realistic picture it can. All that being considered, it’s fair to say the camera on the iPhone 11 Pro is the best the company has ever produced and if photography is your chief concern when buying a phone then this is where you should be putting your cash. Apple has improved the battery life dramatically, giving each model in the 11 line-up a substantial boost over its predecessor. The 11 is said to last up to 17 hours while the 11 Pro manages 18 hours and the 11 Pro Max gets 20 hours. During my time with the 11 Pro, I got well over 24 hours of fair use between charges. That includes browsing the web and messaging throughout the day, watching video and taking a fair number of pictures and videos.