Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max camera review

The Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max is the Cupertino tech giant’s latest and greatest flagship smartphone, featuring a 6.5-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display, Apple’s latest A13 Bionic chipset, and up to 512GB of internal storage. It’s also the first iPhone to come with a triple-camera setup. Next to the primary wide-angle and the tele-camera, which both offer the same focal length as on the predecessor XS Max, there’s now also an ultra-wide camera with a 13mm-equivalent field of view.

On the image processing side of things, the new Deep Fusion technology uses the chipset’s neural engine and advanced machine learning to perform pixel-by-pixel optimization for better textures, lower noise, and a wider dynamic range. Read our full review to find out how the new components play together. (You can find out more about some of the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s new imaging features, including the redesigned camera interface, seamless zooming in video, live bokeh, and HDR preview, in this previous article.)

Key camera specifications:

• Triple-camera setup
• Primary: 12Mp 1/2.55″ sensor, 26mm-equivalent f/1.8-aperture lens, PDAF, OIS
• Ultra-wide: 12Mp sensor, 13mm-equivalent f/2.4-aperture lens
• Tele: 12Mp 1/3.4″ sensor, 52mm-equivalent f/2.0-aperture lens, PDAF, OIS
• Quad-LED dual-tone flash
• 4K video, 2160p/60fps (1080p/30fps default)

About DXOMARK Camera tests: For scoring and analysis in our smartphone camera reviews, DXOMARK engineers capture and evaluate over 1600 test images and more than 2 hours of video both in controlled lab environments and in natural indoor and outdoor scenes, using the camera’s default settings. This article is designed to highlight the most important results of our testing. 

With an overall DXOMARK Camera score of 117, the Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max secures itself a top 5 position in our current ranking. Its Photo score of 124 puts it among the best for still images, and it shares the top spot for Video with the Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro Premium Edition.

The camera performed very well in our tests in pretty much all areas, but some challenges remain. Still images generally show very good exposure. Dynamic range is very wide in bright light and under indoor conditions, but some highlight clipping is still visible in very difficult scenes. Overall, the iPhone is among the very best for exposure; it’s only in very low light when can’t keep up with devices with larger image sensors, such as the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. Like previous iPhone generations, the 11 Pro Max also scores very well for color and is among the best in this category in all light conditions. A slightly greenish cast is visible in some indoor scenes and in our lab tests, but overall color tends to be very pleasant: a slight yellow cast gives some scenes a warm feel and works very well for skin tones in portraits.

A note about image formats for this review: The iPhone 11 Pro Max records photographs in the DCI-P3 colorspace, which their displays also use. DCI-P3 is newer and larger than the sRGB color space that most devices use. So to ensure that the images we used in the review display properly on a wide variety of browsers and devices, we converted the originals from DCI-P3 to sRGB using Photoshop (which is why the published test photos show Photoshop as the creator). This can slightly reduce the richness of color in some cases from what you would see when viewing the original images on a DCI-P3-calibrated display with appropriate software. We also captured the original images using the new HEIF (High-Efficiency Image Format), but then converted them to very high-quality JPEGs for viewing in standard browsers and image editing software. (HEIF is very similar to JPEG, but provides better compression for similar image quality, so the conversion makes the sample image file sizes larger than they were when shot.) Please note, however, that unlike our test images, some of the comparison photos used in this review were shot in JPEG and are used as-is for illustrative purposes; they were not used to compute scores.