I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
> I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
Ooh yeah I love those weird shapes nearly wide open. I found a lens that had a torx bit shaped aperture the other day, I'll have to fish that out and see what it looks like in an image. Lots of compact cameras have a diamond/square-ish hole, notably the Minox 35 range from what I can recall.
Edit: just saw your update with the photos of the mechanism. Wow that's impressive miniaturisation. The hexagonal shape looks surprisingly good. I wonder what's causing the odd effects in the OP. I have noticed in the past that iPhone cameras produce square specular highlights through tree foliage, so I wonder if it's an extension of that oddity.
Yes that mechanism only has two blades! They are sort of sickle-shaped. (Presumably gave the Soviet cloners a chuckle)
I found myself looking at it when I was considering making a DIY aperture for my DIY lenses. (I've personally settled on swappable Waterhouse stops for now but I might fit an eBay microscope aperture, many of them have loads of blades).
Oh and now I'm going to end up looking on eBay for a Minox 35ML or 35GT again. Seriously, never do this while logged in; Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
> Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Because they are a nightmare to own. So lovely when they work but so frustrating because you keep readjusting the shutter mechanism with those tiny screws and you end up wasting so many rolls (and pictures) in the process.
I own a 35GT, barely use it but wouldn't sell it because I have too much empathy. It would feel like receiving money to spell a malediction on someone.
Haha there's certain camera models that are very prone to that. Some of the Pentacon M42 lenses are worth a look if you want an unholy amount of blades - I have a 135mm f/2.8 sat around that has like 15 blades or something daft.
Coincidentally I think I have a non-working 35GT in my market stall (https://camerasetc.wales), so if you want a project drop me an email as I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. I have too much in my repair backlog and those things are fiddly little bastards at the best of times :D
I too have too much clutter so I will have to turn down your kind offer but I will peruse your sites and I may ping you a note sometime about a particular lens I have been looking for — quite a random cheap old one I regret parting company with. (I'm in Kent but I have a friend in Cardiff and if my wallet does not protest I may pop in on your stall)
Ooh do drop me any odd things you're looking for - I never know what's going to turn up, and I do keep a lookout for anything people ask me about. I have debated trying some sort of online stock listing but I think that might just end in chaos due to the lack of space I have for organised storage and other people moving my stuff around.
That reminds me that I need to do a new update post, whoops. I've had an absolute buttload of Pentax K mount gear the past couple of months, which is quite annoying as I don't have that many customers that shoot it. I'll have to big up the Pentax cameras a bit more haha.
Do swing by if you're ever in town when the market's open! I've always got lots of fun cheap stuff kicking about, and a bin of broken shit if you need parts :D
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get an interference of the aperture blades and the wide-open bokeh. With a lens that is prone to ring bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect (and an irregular shape at different angles)
Soap bubble bokeh comes from overcorrected SA. Onion rings and related brightness anomalies/unevenness in bokeh are mostly the result of molded aspheric lenses. Stopping slightly down has not significantly impacted bokeh (apart from apodized lenses) since rounded aperture blades have been invented about fifty years ago.
Following on for clarity, this is why the Duo lacks a dynamic aperture. Seems they must have been quite squeezed for space.l indeed.
Even on the 18 Pro Max the 8x zoom of the telephoto lens is just the 4x using the same 12 MP crop of the 48 MP sensor to "double" the 4x optical zoom as the last generation. I hope we can get some level of optical zoom on a future Duo.
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh. And I say that as someone that shoots my 50mm 1.2 wide open.
Previously the blur on iPhone was all software, apparently. I've set mine to do wide open with no bokeh, and i'll put it in after.
But to be honest, the iPhone is the camera I have on me, so the limits are acceptable. Can I force focus it? No. Can I get the glow? No. But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
Zoom in on the tree leaves, it's very visible on those. They appear as green rings, slightly lighter on the edge, giving it the appearance of a ring. You can also see it very clearly in the spots of sky between the leaves, they appear grey with an almost white outline.
Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
For instance th Xiaomi Ultra 17's main camera is faulted for having shallow depth of field or "autofocus decision errors", which I assume just means the auto selected subject wasn't the person straight in front of the camera ? [0]
These tests seem to be about versatility and predictability more than sheer performance.
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
I’m not convinced that this is a particularly scientific or rigorous test of the cameras! Seems rather lacking in control variables, documented processes, actual measurements etc.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
They Huawei currently are the best when it comes to still pictures, it is the one area/feature they can win, nothing wrong with that. Where Apple wins is in the total hardware and software package, which is why they are better at the video end of the picture in comparison to their competition.
Samsung in the past has also held that distinction, being able to take very good still pictures, but they too fell down when it came to hardware and software, particularly when you start adding in video performance, which requires better software/hardware chops. Nothing is gonna beat Apple chip hardware right now.
> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays
As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.
> You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred
Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos.
Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
Always being five years behind everyone and doing its own boneheaded decisions that they inevitably have to walk back does tend to make Apple the Aztec in this case.
Mockery aside: it's all the same. They're all good enough for portraits where all you want is some depth of field & contrast, they're all good enough for landscapes where they capture colors pretty well, and they're all catastrophic past 5x zoom. You can take the top 10 of DXOMark (hell, the top 20) and you won't realistically find a difference unless you're pixel peeping. Which, we all know your phone pictures are just being sent compressed over Whatsapp, it doesn't matter. If you want camera quality pictures, get a camera. Even a 15 year old shitty Canon will take better pictures than the 18 Pro.
The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture IMO is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.
I saw some tests on it and it’s kind of a whatever feature. The iPhone depth of field is still far too deep even wide open. So the difference stopped down is kind of meaningless.
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
> Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture
This is like saying most users will never adjust the shutter speed. Of course they won't, because the software automatically adjusts it, just like it does on any traditional camera. For the aperture capable lens, the software adjusts the aperture automatically depending upon light and/or depth of field requirements of a scene.
And yes, photographs are still spectacularly important.
But...I don't get it regardless. You know that video also uses apertures on every such equipped device, right? Better depth of field if the environment allows it is a good thing.
> Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point
I feel like people are just saying silly bullshit now. Apple has made video a core part of their product reveals for years now. And current iPhones take outrageously good videos.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background.
Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
Edit: e.g. the tree in one of the images in the page: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
> Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
Why? Where can I read/learn more about this?
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
> I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
Not a diagram but one closeup photo:
https://petapixel.com/2026/09/19/apple-explains-why-the-ipho...
and an animation:
https://petapixel.com/2026/09/09/iphone-18-pro-has-apples-fa...
Six blades with a slightly rounded hook in them by the look of it. Very noticeable sun stars at f/1.8, nice looking results at f/2.8.
Absolutely insane mechanical challenge and assembly challenge.
Ooh yeah I love those weird shapes nearly wide open. I found a lens that had a torx bit shaped aperture the other day, I'll have to fish that out and see what it looks like in an image. Lots of compact cameras have a diamond/square-ish hole, notably the Minox 35 range from what I can recall.
Edit: just saw your update with the photos of the mechanism. Wow that's impressive miniaturisation. The hexagonal shape looks surprisingly good. I wonder what's causing the odd effects in the OP. I have noticed in the past that iPhone cameras produce square specular highlights through tree foliage, so I wonder if it's an extension of that oddity.
Yes that mechanism only has two blades! They are sort of sickle-shaped. (Presumably gave the Soviet cloners a chuckle)
I found myself looking at it when I was considering making a DIY aperture for my DIY lenses. (I've personally settled on swappable Waterhouse stops for now but I might fit an eBay microscope aperture, many of them have loads of blades).
Oh and now I'm going to end up looking on eBay for a Minox 35ML or 35GT again. Seriously, never do this while logged in; Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
> Minox 35 sellers may be among the most desperate I've ever seen in terms of sending you offers, it's relentless.
Because they are a nightmare to own. So lovely when they work but so frustrating because you keep readjusting the shutter mechanism with those tiny screws and you end up wasting so many rolls (and pictures) in the process.
I own a 35GT, barely use it but wouldn't sell it because I have too much empathy. It would feel like receiving money to spell a malediction on someone.
Haha there's certain camera models that are very prone to that. Some of the Pentacon M42 lenses are worth a look if you want an unholy amount of blades - I have a 135mm f/2.8 sat around that has like 15 blades or something daft.
Coincidentally I think I have a non-working 35GT in my market stall (https://camerasetc.wales), so if you want a project drop me an email as I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. I have too much in my repair backlog and those things are fiddly little bastards at the best of times :D
Oh I think I have seen your website before!
I too have too much clutter so I will have to turn down your kind offer but I will peruse your sites and I may ping you a note sometime about a particular lens I have been looking for — quite a random cheap old one I regret parting company with. (I'm in Kent but I have a friend in Cardiff and if my wallet does not protest I may pop in on your stall)
Ooh do drop me any odd things you're looking for - I never know what's going to turn up, and I do keep a lookout for anything people ask me about. I have debated trying some sort of online stock listing but I think that might just end in chaos due to the lack of space I have for organised storage and other people moving my stuff around.
That reminds me that I need to do a new update post, whoops. I've had an absolute buttload of Pentax K mount gear the past couple of months, which is quite annoying as I don't have that many customers that shoot it. I'll have to big up the Pentax cameras a bit more haha.
Do swing by if you're ever in town when the market's open! I've always got lots of fun cheap stuff kicking about, and a bin of broken shit if you need parts :D
Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh, it's the cause of polygonal stopped-down bokeh.
Heavily ringed bokeh just comes from the optics.
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get an interference of the aperture blades and the wide-open bokeh. With a lens that is prone to ring bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect (and an irregular shape at different angles)
> But then I didn't say they were?
Is that a question?
Soap bubble bokeh comes from overcorrected SA. Onion rings and related brightness anomalies/unevenness in bokeh are mostly the result of molded aspheric lenses. Stopping slightly down has not significantly impacted bokeh (apart from apodized lenses) since rounded aperture blades have been invented about fifty years ago.
An aside re: telephoto lens: Duo doesn't have one! It creates the effect of a 2x lens by enlarging the unmagnified image.
Following on for clarity, this is why the Duo lacks a dynamic aperture. Seems they must have been quite squeezed for space.l indeed.
Even on the 18 Pro Max the 8x zoom of the telephoto lens is just the 4x using the same 12 MP crop of the 48 MP sensor to "double" the 4x optical zoom as the last generation. I hope we can get some level of optical zoom on a future Duo.
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
I've seen similar results from images I've taken using quality lenses but overly aggressive develop settings.
Reminds of vintage Meyer-Gorlitz or Zeiss Planar. I'm kinda into it.
Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh. And I say that as someone that shoots my 50mm 1.2 wide open.
Previously the blur on iPhone was all software, apparently. I've set mine to do wide open with no bokeh, and i'll put it in after.
But to be honest, the iPhone is the camera I have on me, so the limits are acceptable. Can I force focus it? No. Can I get the glow? No. But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.
That assertion is not true at all and your comment overall just reeks of Apple apologism.
The average user may not understand the technical details of bokeh but they will certainly have an opinion on what is pleasing to the eye.
> Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh.
I mean, consumers would probably just know it as "nice and pleasing blurred background", versus "this blurred background isn't as nice".
Ring shapes on this image? I’m a not a professional and I don’t see them.
Zoom in on the tree leaves, it's very visible on those. They appear as green rings, slightly lighter on the edge, giving it the appearance of a ring. You can also see it very clearly in the spots of sky between the leaves, they appear grey with an almost white outline.
Zoom in on the large tree in the background. It looks as if it has ornamental balls hanging off it.
Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?
> someone should assemble
Did you miss your parent comment's sarcasm?
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
I was wondering about that too, it seems like it's partly in this test report:
https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AppleiPho...
and then more context, especially for the less objective categories, in this test protocol description:
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-camera-image-quality-test...
It was a little annoying to find (About Us > How We Test) but not awful I suppose.
Zooming in on a clock 4-500yds away and expecting a fully crisp image seems somewhat of a useless benchmark.
I’ll pass on the opinion of a website that has not only a cookie banner, but a stupid modal.
Ad hominem. Very low effort and maturity of thought.
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
It seems that in their ranking currently only the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is ahead?
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
Wow, with a lens that big on a smartphone I'd certainly hope it was fantastic: https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/Huawei/Pura-80-Ultra
The criteria can be pretty weird.
For instance th Xiaomi Ultra 17's main camera is faulted for having shallow depth of field or "autofocus decision errors", which I assume just means the auto selected subject wasn't the person straight in front of the camera ? [0]
These tests seem to be about versatility and predictability more than sheer performance.
[0] https://www.dxomark.com/xiaomi-17-ultra-camera-test/
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
Wouldn’t that comparison be quite a bit closer vs the 17 Pro? I thought that was a decent camera upgrade year but I can’t keep track.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
until the "denoiser" starts to hallucinate
At least it doesn't detect moon shaped objects and impose a static image of the moon on top of it
A little hard to interpret as the Huawei pictures are not cropped to the same frame. When zooming in the difference is less striking.
My gripe with iPhone is hunting white balance. Always happening when I'm shooting video.
I wonder if newer phones / camera apps are better.
I’m not convinced that this is a particularly scientific or rigorous test of the cameras! Seems rather lacking in control variables, documented processes, actual measurements etc.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
They Huawei currently are the best when it comes to still pictures, it is the one area/feature they can win, nothing wrong with that. Where Apple wins is in the total hardware and software package, which is why they are better at the video end of the picture in comparison to their competition.
Samsung in the past has also held that distinction, being able to take very good still pictures, but they too fell down when it came to hardware and software, particularly when you start adding in video performance, which requires better software/hardware chops. Nothing is gonna beat Apple chip hardware right now.
The Huawei uses a 1 inch sensor which is vastly superior in terms of hardware wrt to Apple's one
The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.
> You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras
iPhone, Samsung, Chinese phones, they all do fake moons now.
The iPhone certainly doesn’t.
> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays
As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.
> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_...
Oh god that plasticization of the faces is absolutely horrifying. Like a bad image gen AI from 2022. Or reptilians wearing cheap rubber masks.
Edit: what's with the downvotes?
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
Look at one eye has lashes and the other doesn't! It's just a low-quality AI "denoise+sharpen" filter.
Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.
The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
Compare against the comparison photos. They're there for a reason.
don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg
> what's with the downvotes?
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
> What's insulting about overprocessed photos?
This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.
> You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred
Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos.
Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
Somewhat smoothed? On the model at the back? Her hair has detail to it, but name one clearly defined facial feature on her face.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
> although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
I use GrapheneOS for my own phone and have always been forced into iPhones at work.
iOS, after 12 years of use, is still so terrible that I can't just get over it.
I open my MacBook and will do whatever needs to be done from there.
I should probably get an iPhone for private use too though. It would surely stop me from being on my phone more than I'd like to.
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
That’s harsh - the Aztek was not that bad …
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
I drove an Aztek once and it felt fast enough for regular city driving. Why anyone would _need_ a faster car is beyond me.
I can understand you disliking an OS or vendor after getting used to another one, but there's no 911-Aztec comparison that makes sense here.
You're confusing a personal preference for a fact.
Always being five years behind everyone and doing its own boneheaded decisions that they inevitably have to walk back does tend to make Apple the Aztec in this case.
Mockery aside: it's all the same. They're all good enough for portraits where all you want is some depth of field & contrast, they're all good enough for landscapes where they capture colors pretty well, and they're all catastrophic past 5x zoom. You can take the top 10 of DXOMark (hell, the top 20) and you won't realistically find a difference unless you're pixel peeping. Which, we all know your phone pictures are just being sent compressed over Whatsapp, it doesn't matter. If you want camera quality pictures, get a camera. Even a 15 year old shitty Canon will take better pictures than the 18 Pro.
it tells something that the word "aperture" is only mentioned 3 times in the test
The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture IMO is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.
What are you inferring from that? Interested to hear.
I assume they're implying the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro is more of a marketing/spec sheet thing than an actual meaningful feature
I saw some tests on it and it’s kind of a whatever feature. The iPhone depth of field is still far too deep even wide open. So the difference stopped down is kind of meaningless.
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
> Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture
This is like saying most users will never adjust the shutter speed. Of course they won't, because the software automatically adjusts it, just like it does on any traditional camera. For the aperture capable lens, the software adjusts the aperture automatically depending upon light and/or depth of field requirements of a scene.
And yes, photographs are still spectacularly important.
But...I don't get it regardless. You know that video also uses apertures on every such equipped device, right? Better depth of field if the environment allows it is a good thing.
> Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point
I feel like people are just saying silly bullshit now. Apple has made video a core part of their product reveals for years now. And current iPhones take outrageously good videos.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background. Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
Vibe-reviewed.
Ok so let's hack it