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Halide is one of the most popular camera apps available for iPhone, allowing users to manually adjust focus, exposure, white balance, and more before taking a photo. As the iPhone 12 Pro Max is officially available now, developer Sebastiaan de With shared more technical details about the camera on this year’s most expensive iPhone model on Halide’s blog.
Unlike last year’s models, the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera is different from the regular iPhone 12 Pro camera. Users of this year’s Pro Max model will find a 47% larger f / 1.6 wide sensor, sensor shift stabilization, 87% higher ISO, and a new telephoto lens with a 65mm length and 2.5x optical zoom.
While most of these specifications were already known, Sebastiaan details exactly what the benefits are with these numbers and what they mean in practice for users. He created a great illustration to show how much bigger the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s new camera sensor is. The iPhone sensor captures images at 3024 by 4032 pixels or 12 megapixels.
Apple could have simply added more pixels to the sensor, but instead the company did something different. The iPhone 12 Pro Max’s camera sensor has larger individual pixels, which are called “photosites.” A larger photosite means it can capture more light, resulting in images with less noise and more definition.
When comparing photos taken with the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max, the differences are hardly noticeable, at least if you captured them during the day. Users will notice the differences between the cameras of the two phones as soon as they take pictures in low-light scenarios.
Most of the people who don’t see the big difference are shooting in daylight, with a fast ƒ / 1.6 lens. On top of that, Apple’s intelligent image processing combines multiple shots together, making it difficult to find the hardware.
Here is a comparison of photos taken at sunset with the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. The second photo, which was taken with the Pro Max model, has a noticeably higher level of detail.
While the larger sensor helps the iPhone capture better images, Sensor Shift technology is also responsible for shooting low-light images with more detail.
As the Halide developer explains, iPhones have had optical image stabilization for some time, reducing the impact of shaky hand movements when taking a photo. The more stabilized the camera is, the more you can increase the exposure time to capture more light.
On the iPhone 12 Pro Max, stabilization is applied directly to the sensor rather than the camera lens. Since the sensor itself is smaller and lighter than the entire lens assembly, it can move faster to compensate for hand movement.
The software cannot get rid of your hand. Night mode on iPhone fixes this by taking a bunch of photos and just throwing away the ones that ended up too shaky. Now we see that the iPhone 12 Pro Max is actually ahead of its smaller brothers, iPhone 12 mini, 12 and 12 Pro:
Taking zoomed photos on the iPhone 12 Pro Max also got better thanks to the new telephoto lens that can go up to 2.5x optical zoom versus 2x on other iPhones. However, that also means that the lens has a smaller aperture, so users may notice a worse experience when zooming on the iPhone 12 Pro Max in low-light scenarios.
You can read more technical details about the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera on Halide’s official blog.
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