The best smartphone for video gets even better iPhone 11 Pro

The best smartphone for video gets even better

The iPhone XS had plenty of competition for still photo quality, but its overall video quality was top of the heap. Since then, the best Android phones have perhaps taken the crown, but the improvements in the iPhone 11 should be enough to steal it back.

You can shoot up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second on the rear cameras while still benefitting from extended dynamic range and image stabilisation - features that were only available up to 4K30 on last year's models. Add in the ability to smoothly zoom in from ultrawide to telephoto and you've got a powerfully capable video device.

You can see small transitions when making the transition between the ultra wide, wide, and telephoto lenses, and each one has slightly different quality characteristics - they are different sensors with different lenses, after all. But Apple has done a very impressive job matching colour and exposure as much as possible to create the smoothest transitions when switching cameras that I've ever seen.

Stealing a page from some of the latest Android phones, Apple has a new Audio Zoom feature. When you zoom in past 1x while recording video, background noise will be diminished and the audio will focus on your subject. It's a really noticeable effect, especially when standing in a noisy environment like next to a street or a fountain, but it's not so aggressive as to sound completely unnatural.

A better camera interface, too

The camera interface has been given some really thoughtful improvements.

Tap-and-hold on the shutter button and you'll start recording a video rather than taking a series of photos in a burst. A swipe to one direction to lock video recording on, swipe the other to take that burst shot. I've needed to take a spontaneous video far more often than burst photos, and I think most users would appreciate this change.

The "dial" interface for smoothly zooming in and out is a much easier way to get precisely the right shot than pinch-to-zoom, too.

Now, features like changing the aspect ratio, choosing filters, and setting a timer are accessed in a features bar that appears when you swipe up on the camera modes and disappears when you swipe down. It's a good place for this stuff, and leaves plenty of room for future expansion without cluttering the interface.

It would be really nice to change video resolution and frame rate in the camera interface instead of the Settings app, but Apple still hasn't got the memo on that.

When you're shooting with the telephoto or wide angle lens, the black bars on the side of the main viewfinder show what would be captured by the next widest lens. It's a nice way to quickly assess whether you should take a wider shot.

Frustratingly, all of these improvements, save the wider-angle preview, could easily be brought to prior generation iPhones. They should have been part of iOS 13, not exclusive to the iPhone 11.

The fastest phone money can buy

Apple's A-series processors are second to none. The A12 Bionic in last year's iPhone XR and XS was the overall fastest mobile CPU on any smartphone, and had nearly the fastest GPU. This year, Apple says it has made significant improvements in the A13.

According to Apple, the new A13 Bionic uses TSMC's new second-generation 7nm process, which improves energy efficiency and allows for higher clock speeds. The results are impressive.

According to Apple, pretty much every part of the A13 is 20 percent faster than before: the CPU (high power and high efficiency cores), the GPU, and the Neural Engine. In addition, there are new machine learning accelerators in the CPU - separate from the Neural Engine - that perform matrix multiplication operations six times faster.

Power efficiency is improved, too. Apple says the Neural engine uses 15 percent less power, the big CPU cores use 30 percent less power, the little high-efficiency CPU cores use 40 percent less power, and so does the GPU.

There's a catch, though. Apple says these power improvements are "for those applications and tasks that don't need more performance than the A12." In other words, the GPU uses 40 percent less power when running at the same speed as the GPU in the A12 - when it clocks up to run 20 percent faster, that power savings is reduced or lost.

No matter how you slice it, this is a crazy-fast and very efficient mobile processor. Benchmarks aren't the be-all and end-all of performance measurement, but they're a good way to run the same exact tasks in the same exact way on different hardware. So let's take a look at a few.