iPhone 14 Pro Detailed Camera Review – 3 Months Later!
After using the iPhone 14 Pro for over 2 months and taking over 2300 images and videos with it, I think I am, ready to share its camera review with you guys. Hey guys it’s Sagar and in this video, we take a very detailed look at all the cameras on this iPhone 14 Pro. Now I have a ton of image and video samples to show you, so I am not going to spend any time telling you the camera specs and camera app interface changes. All you need to know is that almost all the cameras on this
14 Pro are upgrades over the last year, and the main camera now gets an even bigger 48 megapixel sensor. With that let us dive straight into the image samples, starting with the bright daytime shots. So years after the competition moved on to using higher resolution sensors, Apple has finally included a 48 megapixel primary camera on the 14 Pro this year. Physically it is the biggest sensor that Apple has put on their phone yet, and this helps it capture such detailed looking images. Although it is a 48 megapixel sensor, just like any other phone with a
higher resolution sensor, these are pixel binned 12 megapixel images. You can take 48 megapixel images too, and we will lookout them a bit later, but for now, check
main camera on this iPhone 14 Pro will deliver amazing amount of details in each outdoor daytime shot. Actually not just outdoor, but even in indoor daytime shots, you can see that the 12 megapixel have incredible amount of details. There is a bit more contrast in these indoor shots, which makes the darker areas appear more dark than do with your eyes. Some of you might like this while the other might not, its up to your personal preference. As good as these images look, it’s not all sunshine and Rainbows tough. The colours in these images are a
bit off at times. Firstly, they are more saturated than how the scene looked in real life, and secondly, there is also a slight yellow tint in almost all of these shorts. For reference, here is a same image form the iPhone 14 Pro and one of the other phone which I am testing. I can’t tell its name now, or it will spoil my next video. But look at how much more saturation and contrast iPhone 14 Pro’s image has compared to the other. The colours in real life looked more like in the image from the other phone.
That being said, since last year, we have photographic styles on iPhones, and thanks to them we can tweak the colours, saturation, contrast and tone in these images. And once I tweaked these settings a bit, the colours looked closer to how the scene looked in real life. Coming to the dynamic range. I have been a bit critical about the dynamic range on iPhones for the last couple of years, because I think Apple hasn’t really improved it much ever since SmartHDR 2. I mean these images look good, the brighter and darker areas are handled decently, but that’s
it. Overall I would say the images look dull, specially when we compare them with HDR shots form other flagship smartphones. In this shot the phone did well with the shadows, and we see a lot of details in the leaves. But the bright sky in the background is blown out, and we can barely see its blue colour. Again in this shot we see a yellow tint in the overall shot, and the shot kind of looks dull. Would you agree. iPhones have always been one of the best when it comes to focusing. They are quick at it,
and the transition is very smooth. This iPhone 14 Pro is no different in that sense. Look at how good this close up shot turned out. But, and yes, there is again a but, because the main sensor is so big and the aperture is so wide, the minimum focusing distance on this phone is one of the worst that I’ve ever seen. Even from this far, the main camera can’t set the focus properly, and I have to move a few more inches away from the subject. I think I have to move so back, that I don’t even
consider these to be close up shots anymore. I really love getting up and close top my subjects, but this phone just won’t let me do that. There’re is however a workaround for that. I can tap the 2x button, and that lets me take good close up shots. These are still incredibly detailed, as they are true 12 megapixel shots from the centre of the 48 megapixel main sensor. Even after 2 months, I am still yet to get used to taking close up shots without being very close to the subject. Every-time I need to take close up
image, I have to keep in mind to hit the 2x button, which is getting a bit annoying. I wish the minimum focusing distance was slightly better, so I that I wouldn’t have to go through this pain. All that being said, once the close up shots are captured, They look amazing. They are a bit pain to get to, at least for me, but if the results look this good, Is the process worth it. I am still not sure about it. To get even close to the subject, you can switch to the macro mode, and it lets
you take shots like this. Unlike most other phones, these are 12 megapixel macro shots. We don’t get a dedicated macro camera, but the ultra wide lens delivers these cool looking macro shots, I think this is the best way to achieve these shots. I don’t take these shots all that often, these are the only ones which I took. I like how they turn out, and I would like to start taking more of them. Does your phone have macro shooting ability and do you use it often? Let me know in the comments. Speaking of the wide lens,
its still a 12 megapixel sensor, but it gets a wider F/2.2 aperture which lets in more light on the sensor, helping us get more details in these shots. Not to mention, this lens helps us get much more of the scene in the shot compared tot he normal lens. This lens also helps us shot the scale of things, like in this shot. In the normal shot, you can’t make out how big the river is. The wide lens gives us a perspective of the scale. Thanks to lens correction, the edges or lines in the shot are not
bulged making the images look natural. We also get a 77mm lens, so there is a 3x optical zoom lens on this phone, and its lets us get closer to things. There is also a 2x digital zoom option, which captures a 12 megapixel image form the middle portion of the 48 megapixel sensor. So this is actually a lossless 2x 12 megapixel image. Thanks to this option, we have 4 different focal lengths with just 3 cameras. When outside, I have started using the 3x lens more and more. It gives me an opportunity to compose a scene in
very unique ways. You can keep on zooming in digitally upto 15 times. Those images don’t look all that good, but surprisingly, the 5x and 10x digital zoom images look much better than from previous iPhones. If there is ample light and you have steady hands, these images end up looking good enough, actually much better than I expected them to look. So its finally time we look at the higher resolution 48 megapixel shots from the main image sensor, and compare them against the regular 12 megapixel ones. In order to take 48 megapixel shots, you will have to
switch to the RAW mode, and enable the 48 megapixel mode from within the settings. The normal 12 megapixel shot has a size of something between 1.5-4.5MB, but some 48 megapixel shots can take upto 120MB of storage space, which is crazy if you think about it. If I zoom in 5-6 times on both these images, you can see how much more details the 48 megapixel ones have compered to the normal 12 megapixel ones. I always thought that the 12 megapixel shots from iPhones cameras were sharper and more detailed than most of the other phones, but these
48 megapixel shots are on a whole another level. These are ProRAW images, so they have some computations pre-applied, but there is still a ton of room and information if you want to edit them even further. You can play with the colours, highlights, shadows, exposure, tone, crop in to recompose the shot, and do much more with these images, the possibilities are endless. This mode comes in handy when you want to capture images of some architecture or landscape, where you would want to preserve most of the details or zoom in in some part go the image later
on. Unlike most other phones, these higher resolution shots have great dynamic range and good colours, so if you want, you can click most of your daytime shots in this mode. But as I said before, the file sizes are enormous, so your internal storage might fill up pretty very fast. So I would suggest, for most of your daily shots, stick to the default 12 megapixel mode, as those shots look amazing as well. Now I love shooting portrait mode images with my phone and to no ones surprise, I’ve always felt that iPhones have had the best and
most natural looking portrait mode shots out of any smartphone. Just look at these shots. The edge detection is almost perfect, the subject is in such sharp focus, the blur rolloff is so natural, and the background blur makes these images look like they have been shot with an actual DSLR camera. Look at the dynamic range in these portrait shots, it just looks so good. There are no dark shadows on the face, and there are no overexposed parts in the background. But in this next shot, the edge separation and background blur is perfect, but the colours were
somehow messed up. The whole image has a greenish yellow tint, which ruined the shot for me. We could fix the colours with a little editing, but with the amount of money I spent on this phone, am I wrong to expect it to get the colours right every time! That being said, most of the portrait shots which I took had good looking colours, as you can see here. Thanks to the 3x telephoto lens, we have the option of taking zoomed in portrait shots. Look at the difference the 3x lens makes to the background. It’s so nicely
compressed, and gives the image a completely different look. When in well lit conditions I like taking these zoomed in portrait shots, but you should know that you need to be pretty far away from your subject to get them in the frame. I would also avoid using the mode indoors or in anything less than ideal light, because this lens don’t have the best sensor and aperture, so low light zoomed in portrait shots might have a bit too much grain if the light is not enough. That being said, I loved taking portrait shots with this iPhone 14
Pro. I had equally amazing time taking portrait shots of objects. I feel like using the portrait mode is the easiest way to make your images stand out and look that much more professional, compared to the sea of other normal looking shots, which basically have no depth or another dimension to them. So go out, shoot some portrait shots with whichever phone you have, and look how much different those images look compared to your normal shots. Moving on to the images which I shot in artificial and lower lighting conditions. Most of the flagship phones do really well
in these conditions, and thanks to the huge image sensor, wide aperture and now Pixel binning, main camera on the iPhone 14 Pro is no different. It takes just as good images as it did during the daytime, without even breaking a sweat. These are again 12 megapixel shots, because the 48 megapixel mode isn’t the best when it comes to capturing images in these lighting conditions. Even then, you can see there are plenty of details in these artificially lit 12 megapixel images. I am surprised to see that there is absolutely no noise at all even in the
darker parts of these images. One of the reasons for that is the deep fusion mode. When there is any sort of ambient light, like in these shots, the deep fusion mode is triggered automatically, and it grabs a few long and short exposure frames, and combines them to form a detailed noise free shot. This time around, the deep fusion algorithm is applied before the image is processed, instead of after like on previous iPhones, and that makes these images look even more detailed. All of this happens in the background and without any delay or shutter lag, so
you can keep on shooting at your own pace, without missing any of the action. The colours in these low images are slightly on the cooler side though. For some reason the 14 Pro tries to make most of the lights and colours appear cooler, which is surprising, because iPhones have for the longest time let the colours in the images look as they were in real life. This is one of the very few smartphone cameras, that I like to use in lower light. Not because of the night mode, but because of how late the night mode decided
to kick. Don’t get me wrong, night mode images look good, but it takes at least a couple of seconds to capture, and if you move your phone during that time, or if you have someone in the shot who moves during that time, the shot will be blurred out and unusable. I like that this iPhone 14 Pro is not too keen on switching to the night mode, and despite of that, the huge images sensor, wide aperture and OIS help us get such detailed shots. The lens flair issue is still present, which has been plaguing the iPhones
since the iPhone 11, but thankfully it has been reduced to a great extent. I am not talking about these flairs, but the ghosting dots that we see in some of the shots. These ones are good kind of flairs. I actually composed the shot this way purposefully, so I could get these flairs in the shot. I feel these kind of flairs in the shot give it a different character. Alright, now as we move to even lower light, you can keep on capturing the shot without the night mode, but you will see more and more noise creeping
in the shot. But if you turn on the night mode, then the images are much more cleaner, like you can see in these shots. Images with the night mode have more light and details in them, and at the same time, the noise level is reduced by a huge margin. That being said, I try and limit using the night mode for the reasons I mentioned earlier, and more often than not, I would rather take a shot without the night mode, than with it. But if you do want to use the night mode, 14 Pro will end
up taking amazing shots even in very low light. The wide lens now gets a slightly wider aperture, which lens more light to hit the sensor behind it, resulting in better looking low light wide shots than previous iPhones. Just like during the daytime, wide lens lets you capture a different perspective of the same scene, and show much more of it. We went through his earlier, that the wide lens doesn’t have the best image sensor, or the lens optics, and this results in an even bigger difference in the normal and wide shots in lower light. There is
much more information and less noise in the normal shots compared to the wide ones. Yes, the wide lens also gets night mode, but these images take over twice as long to capture compared to night mode shots with the normal lens, and this means you will have to hold the phone steady for over 3 to 5 seconds, for these images to look decent. Because of all these reasons, I would suggest you to stick to the main camera for most of your low light shots. The 3x telephoto lens captures lot of detailed even in lower light, but
since the aperture is very narrow on this lens, there isn’t enough light in these shots. You will have the option to use this lens in lower light, but the results might not be all that rewarding, if the lighting conditions are like this. Personally I like to stick to the normal camera for all of my low light shots. That one gets the biggest image sensor, widest aperture and OIS, which makes its images look so much better than any of the ones taken with the wide or telephoto lens. That brings us to the front facing camera. This
camera still has a 12 megapixel sensor, but its now a better sensor, has a much wider F/1.9 aperture and it also gets autofocus, all of which helps the selfies from this iPhone 14 Pro look so good. I’ve been saying for the longest time that selfies from the iPhones were just not up to the mark, but with the 14 series, Apple has turned that around. These selfies look amazing and have a ton of details in them. Skin tones look good, and the colour temperature and white balance is also more consistent while taking selfies. I don’t take
too many selfies outside of these camera review and comparison videos, but if you do, you will love this upgraded selfie camera. Edge detection is again almost perfect for portrait selfies. And since just the subject is in focus and everything else is gradually blurred out, faces in these ones look even sharper than the normal selfies. That being said, despite of having Autofocus and advanced processing algorithms, if you have multiple in the shot, someone will still be blurred out. I wish Apple could fix this thing. If I have multiple people in my portrait selfies, I would like
every one of them to be in sharp focus, not just the ones who are closest to the camera. Here is a video from he front facing camera of the iPhone 14 Pro. You can see how it handles the overall colours of the scene, exposure and stabilisation when I am walking around with it. There is a match going on next to me, so you can also let me know in the comments, how do you think, this phone is picking my voice. You might already know this, but iPhone are the best when it comes to shooting videos.
No matter what everyone else says, no matter what resolution or frame rate options Android flagship phones boast to have, none of them have the smoothness, quality, colours, or even the bitrate as the iPhones videos have. Just look at these videos from the main camera. If you are on a vacation with your friends or family, this is the phone you would want to be carrying so you could take the best looking videos. Switching between the lenses while shooting videos is very seamless and smooth, and no matter which camera you shoot with, the video will look excellent.
Here I was in some tight spaces, so the normal lens could not show the entire place or scale of things. Switching to the wide lens made a whole lot of difference. It lets me show how grand and majestic these arches were. Even for this video, the normal lens did not let me show the scale of the entire architecture, but wide lens make a big difference. It let me get the whole tomb in one shot and even you guys can see the scale of the entire structure in a better way. The cinematic mode which was introduced
with iPhone 13 series, now lets you shoot videos in 4k resolution, and they look even better. And just like before, you can change the amount of blur to the background and switch the focus points, even after you have shot the video. With that, we have seen over 150 image and video samples from all the cameras on this iPhone 14 Pro. I loved the cameras on this phone and the overall experience of taking these images. Unlike the previous iPhones, it doesn’t get too hot too soon even if you are shooting outside, so you can continue clicking
images for much longer. And the screen now gets much brighter, so viewing the display even under direct sun is not an issue. These cameras are definitely an upgrade over the previous iPhones, specially the main 48 megapixel sensor. There are however 3-4 issues which I faced on this phone. I have mentioned them throughout the video, but I will list them down once more. First, I don’t like the weird yellow tint in some of its shots. It might not be very easily visible when we look at these images alone. But it’s very apparent, as soon as we
compare these images with ones from other phones. Next, I would have liked the HDR mode to do an even better job. Other thing which frustrated me is the inability of the main camera to focus on very close by things. I take a lot of close up shots, and not being able to get close enough to the subjects made me miss a lot of shots in these last 2-3 months. And the final issue I have is a cosmetic one and this might not even bother everyone as much as it does me. I hate how much dust
gets caught around the lenses in this glossy camera module. I just hate that, and I am constantly trying to wipe it clean. I wish Apple used matte glass on this camera module as well, so it gathered a bit less dust and debris. That’s it. I am working on the comparing the cameras on this phone with some of the other phone that I have, and those videos will be hitting your subscription box very soon. So these were my thoughts about the cameras on this iPhone 14 Pro. You guys saw all these images too, so what do
you think about these cameras, let me know in the comments. That is it for this video guys. Please hit the like button if you enjoyed this video, and subscribe to the channel for more quality tech videos like this. You can also check out some of the other videos from this channel. This has been Sagar and I’ll catch you guys in the next video. Take Care.
