Camera trio iPhone 11 Pro
Yes, the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max are among the best camera phones available. It’s not just the fact that Apple has added an extra lens — yes, it adds versatility — but that the improvements largely come from image processing.
Smart HDR is, well, smarter. There’s a Night Mode for superior low-light photos, and a new feature called semantic rendering that snaps several underexposed photos before you tap the shutter button, the photo you want when you tap the button, and an overexposed shot afterward to balance out the lighting and merge them together. The camera can also understand specific parts of the photo, like a face or a flower, and apply separate Smart HDR improvements to those areas rather than a blanket change to the whole photo.
All of this is viewed through the triple-camera system, which packs 12 megapixels per sensor. The main f/1.8 sensor is the standard wide-angle. Then there’s the telephoto lens, which now has a wider f/2.0 aperture for better low-light photography, and the new ultra-wide-angle lens, which has an f/2.4 aperture and a 120-degree field of view so you can take in more of a scene.
The new ultra-wide-angle lens isn’t entirely unique, but it’s still somewhat special among flagship phones. Google’s Pixel 4, the popular Android alternative won’t have a wide-angle lens.
Photos snapped during the day deliver largely natural colors, sometimes with a bit of a warm tone. Details are impeccably strong, and switching between each of these lenses feels seamless and smooth.
The telephoto lens now offers up more detail in lower-light conditions, but I wish the same could be said for the new ultra-wide-angle lens. It takes fantastic daytime shots, but it doesn’t perform that well at night, as you can see in the below comparison with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus.
Portrait mode and selfies
My favorite change in Portrait mode is that you can now capture a photo not just with the telephoto lens, but also the main f/1.8 lens as well.
It means you can actually get great-looking portraits at night; the portrait photo from the normal lens has a ton more detail than the grainy and blurry one from the telephoto. That wasn’t possible on last year’s iPhone XS Max. If you’re interested in comparisons with last year’s iPhone XS Max, check out our camera shootout.
Portrait mode still isn’t perfect, but it produces some of the most DSLR-like images among its competition. The Pixel 3 still gives it a run for its money, though.