Photography is considered to be one of the most important things on the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Especially after the manufacturer decided to use two lenses on the bigger model. As you probably already know, the iPhone 7 Plus has dual rear cameras and optical zoom. Below you can read what we think about the new Apple device and its image capturing capabilities.
First of all, there is no big difference comparing the performance of the iPhone 6s camera.
In this text, we will only talk about pictures, not videos, since there will be a special test for that soon. Also, the big and tempting mode that has been announced will be available only after the software update (later this year). That’s supposed to be the new portrait mode that can produce shallow depth-of-field effects and it should be available on the iPhone 7 Plus version.
In general, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus should be able to make sharper and, in general, better, photos.
New Upgrades
As for the front camera, both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will have new lenses. Now, instead of 5, new devices will be equipped with 7-megapixel sensors.
Of course, the new iPhone camera is better than the previous ones and is coming with some improvements. At first glance, the most evident change is the number of lenses. iPhone 7 Plus will now have two cameras on the back. The second camera will be a 2x optical telephoto with a f/2.8 lens. As for the both models – iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the main back camera have a larger aperture lens of f/1.8, which should be able to absorb more light into the sensor, according to Apple’s claim. The result will be higher quality images, especially in the low light regime.
Different than the previous generation where only iPhone 6s Plus had image stabilization, both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have the optical image stabilizer. This feature is very helpful since it actually allows the internal lens to slightly float in order to recoup for the mini shakes made by hand. This will enable longer exposures without making the photo blurred.
“Quad-LED True Tone” – that is the official Apple name for the new LED flash. It has four LEDs in order to be slightly brighter than the ones we had before. It will also have better adjustments to the scene color temperature. This is going to be useful for making sharper images in dark and low light conditions.
Results
Let’s start with the flash. The Quad-LED True Tone flash was not exceptionally better than ones used before. As for the low-light situations, there was also no major difference. No superior photos were taken. But, when it comes to still images taken with the back cameras, there are major improvements. The new, additional 2x (zoom) telephoto camera performed better than the 1x (non-zoom) camera. So, the 1x still camera on both new models produced superb quality, but it was still not enough to be much better from images taken with the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models. On the other hand, the 2x still camera (Apple iPhone 7 Plus) made a lot sharper photographs comparing to the ones made by iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus or even the 1x lenses on both iPhone 7 models.
