The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Cameras: A Comprehensive Review

As I held the new iPhone 12s in my hands, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. The camera has long been one of the most important features for many phone buyers, and Apple had promised significant improvements with this latest generation. One thing that struck me immediately was the added lidar sensor on the back of the iPhone 12 Pro Max. This new feature is supposed to help with focusing and provide depth information to the camera, allowing it to set its focus more accurately.

The camera has been improved in a number of ways. The dual-camera setup on both the standard and Pro models allows for better zooming in, especially when taking portraits. One notable difference between the two phones is that the Pro models can actually reach up to five times zoom, whereas the standard iPhone 12 only reaches three times zoom. I found this to be quite noticeable, especially when trying to capture distant subjects.

Another area where the camera has been improved is in video recording and editing capabilities. The iPhone 12s are now able to record, edit, and share content in Dolby Vision HDR (High Dynamic Range) format. This is a significant achievement, as it requires the phone to capture two streams of video at once, one with high exposure and low exposure, and also capture 60 times more color information than before. On top of that, the camera individually corrects every single frame in real-time as you're recording it. Dolby describes this as "revolutionary" - a jump from standard definition to high definition video.

To illustrate the benefits of HDR, I recorded an identical video on all three phones and then edited it to highlight the differences. When I adjusted the shadows, brightness, and saturation, I could see how much more stable and detailed the image looked on the iPhone 12 Pro compared to the iPhone 11. The improved stabilization system also made a noticeable difference in low-light conditions.

One notable limitation of the new camera system is that it can only record Dolby Vision at 30 frames per second on the standard iPhone 12, while the iPhone 12 Pro can do 60 frames per second. Additionally, I've found that HDR content has been causing compatibility issues with some applications.

In conclusion, while the new iPhone 12s cameras have improved in many areas, they still lack the massive image sensor and superior optics of pure optical zoom that we're seeing on Android phones like the ultra-flagship models. However, for most users, these improvements will be more than enough to enhance their mobile photography experience.

Low Light Video: The New Game Changer

One area where I think Apple has truly outdone themselves is in low-light video capabilities. With the new camera system, the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Max can now capture exceptional footage even in extremely dimly lit environments. This is largely due to the improved image signal processor (ISP) in the new chip, which provides better noise reduction and color correction.

When I tried running while recording on all three phones, I couldn't really notice a difference between them in terms of low-light performance. However, when filming in complete darkness, I could see that the iPhone 12 Pro Max was significantly better than the standard iPhone 11. The camera's improved noise reduction and color correction allowed for more detailed and vibrant footage, even in the most challenging conditions.

It's worth noting that the improved low-light capabilities are one of the major selling points of the new iPhone 12s. If you're looking to capture high-quality video in a variety of lighting conditions, these phones are definitely among the best on the market.

Overall, I think Apple has done an excellent job of addressing many of the weaknesses of the previous generation, while also introducing some exciting new features that set the new iPhone 12s apart from their predecessors.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so just for a bit of context i've been using the iphone 11 pro as my main phone for about five months now and while i would say it's probably the most reliable camera i've ever used whether you're taking photo or video no matter which lens you're using it looks good i would also say that it's rarely amazing there's been a lot of android phones this year which have come out with massive image sensors they've really pushed phone photography closer to dslr photography so i was kind of sat here hoping that iphone 12 and iphone 12 pro would be when apple followed suit so we ventured high and low we took over 200 shots we even tried filming a music video to properly compare these new iphones to the old iphones real quick by the way i have also launched a pretty big iphone 12 giveaway rules for that are in the description so i wanted to start with this photo taken on the phone's ultrawide cameras because you'll notice something rather unusual here the ultrawide cameras on all these phones are identical but the shots on both iphone 12s look better again here my face is crisper the menu in front of me more defined or here everything from the texture of the floor to the details in the chandelier above me are better on the iphone 12s why well it's because of something called deep fusion so every time you take a photo on one of these iphone 12s it actually captures nine different shots at various different exposures it then goes through all of them and picks the best parts of each of them and merges them now the iphone 11 pro already supports deep fusion on its main and zoom cameras but with the iphone 12s it's better it's faster and it works on all cameras and that also includes the front all three of these phones again have identical selfie cameras and yet the 12 and 12 pro have like a whole extra layer of detail just look at my eyes or the fabric of my coat here there's more if you take a look at the main camera on the iphone 12 and 12 pro while apple hasn't upgraded the sensor like i kind of hoped they would they have given us a better lens to bring in more light this is one of the new iphone's headline features and probably the best way of showing it is by going even darker no not that dark you probably know that with an iphone 11 when the environment gets dark enough and you take a photo it'll automatically spend two seconds or so taking a night mode shot and historically iphones have had good but i wouldn't say the best night mode out there so apple improved it but i gotta say the difference is not as noticeable as i was hoping it would be apple says the new phones capture 27 more light and i could believe that that seems about right in a best case scenario there is less grain on photos everything does look a bit brighter but unless you get really dark it's not the kind of difference you'd even notice without a side-by-side however there are four situations in which the iphone 12's cameras at night really pull ahead number one being the ultrawide camera because while iphone 11 could only use night mode on the main camera iphone 12 can do it on all of them this as you'd expect makes a world of difference you've got more light you've got better textures more object definition you've got the front cameras for the same reason iphone 11 didn't have night mode here iphone 12 does then there's night mode time lapse where if you decide to shoot a time lapse then your iphones can sort of automatically detect night and adjust how they're shooting on the fly to bring in more light accordingly and finally night time portraits but before i get to that i should probably explain lidar so exclusively on the iphone 12 pro you've probably seen that there's a new sensor in the camera module and what it does is fires out infrared waves to figure out how far objects are from you and because we're talking about infrared here this sensor works just as well in the night as it does during the day so while most phones they struggle to get an outline of a person and take a portrait mode shot as the light starts to dip the iphone 12 pro doesn't struggle as much because it has that depth information you'll notice a little bit of an improvement in mid to low lighting conditions bit of extra sharpness bit of extra brightness but if you go to super low light i would say this might just be the use case that is the single most noticeable disparity between these three phones iphone 11 won't activate portrait mode at all it's too dark it doesn't even know what's what iphone 12 might activate portrait mode because it can see a little bit more thanks to the better lens but the iphone 12 pro is the only phone that can activate both portrait mode and night mode at the same time so it ends up way ahead now this is all good stuff i'm really happy that apple has kind of fixed a lot of the caveats that came with the iphone 11's camera like oh you can shoot this but not in this particular mode there's none of that with the iphone 12. however i can't help but wonder why a lot of this stuff isn't available on the 11 pro 2. things like ultra wide night mode android phones have had for years but okay let's just forget about night mode for a second because let's face it 85 percent of your photos are probably going to be during the day time so in these cases is the iphone 12 basically just the same as the iphone 11. not quite so the other thing that iphone 12 has running in the background at all times is the next generation of apple's smart hdr an algorithm that's there to just try and improve photo quality and i would say that it does do a slightly better job of looking at each element within a photo and being like okay we can make this part a little sharper and brighter or okay we can make this part a little softer admittedly it is one of those features that's very easy to kind of roll your eyes at but having compared it to the phone that came before and also some phones that came much earlier it is a feature that makes almost every part of almost every photo you take ever so slightly better so for example in this shot take a look at the brickwork on the left or the leaves on the far right can you see that everything on the 12s is just a little bit better exposed and a little crisper or faces it seems like these new phones can identify faces and just kind of lighten them up a little bit especially if you've got a really bright background behind you the clouds are softer and less grainy looking and often a little better exposed too smart hdr is active on every camera so even when you're taking selfies faces are a little brighter cloud's a little cleaner but you're probably noticing that i'm using the word little quite a lot and that's because while the iphone 12 is better than the iphone 11 for sure a lot of these improvements are so subtle that you have to look for them the iphone 12 camera is what i would call an aggregation of micro refinements another example of this is because of that lidar scanner and this sort of understanding of what's foreground and what's background i'm finding the iphone 12 pro's portrait mode is more confident it really defines the edges of your subject the jumper you're wearing even your hair better than past generations the person almost looks like they're jumping out at you a bit more lidar also helps with focusing it's feeding depth information to the camera so the camera knows what distance to set its focus to a little faster oh and while we're here side note you'll probably have noticed that both pro phones they zoom in when taking portraits that's just because they can really they both have two times telephoto cameras whereas the standard iphone 12 doesn't i definitely prefer the way the pro phones do it also the fact that they have telephoto cameras means that just generally when you're zooming into things on these pros you can get to at least five times before the image starts breaking down now actually one of the biggest features of these new iphone 12s one thing i wouldn't call a micro refinement is what happens to video there's actually two things one of them kind of minor one of them kind of amazing so the first thing is improved optical image stabilization so normally when you move your phone one way your camera lens actually slightly moves the other way to try and keep images still now none of that's changed the core mechanism is the same but with the iphone 12s those corrections are happening 5 000 times per second as opposed to 1000 times per second can i tell when i'm taking video on all these phones not really i'm sure there is a difference i'm sure there are situations where it's more noticeable than others but just generally walking around i can't i even tried running while recording on all three phones squinting at my monitor trying to discern something i couldn't but let me know if you can now what i do think is really cool is the iphone 12 and iphone 12 pro are the first phones in the world to be able to record edit and share in dolby vision hdr sort of and that is not an easy thing to do the phone has to basically record two streams of video at the same time one high exposure one low exposure and on top of that capture something like 60 times the amount of color information and on top of that individually color correct every single frame in real time as you're recording it dolby describes this as as revolutionary as the jump from standard definition to high definition video for me i wouldn't go that far but it does give you a lot of room for maneuver now just bear in mind as i'm showing you this that you're not going to be able to see the full benefits of hdr in this video we've had to kind of compress it so it'll actually work with my video editor but to kind of give you an idea of how it can make a difference let's take this identical video shot on all three phones now if we head into the video editor and dial up the shadows make it brighter crank up the saturation can you see how the video on the iphone 11 is starting to fall apart a bit whereas on the 12s it looks exactly as you'd expect it to i gotta say i have found this hdr content giving me some compatibility trouble with some applications but at the same time i would expect over the coming years this to become more and more adopted as like a a standard format and i should mention while both iphones can record in dolby vision iphone 12 can only do it at 30 frames per second iphone 12 pro can do 60 presumably because of extra ram oh yeah and low light video is better too dolby vision combined with a better lens and an improved image signal processor in the new chip means that if you really did want to film that music video iphone 12 will probably do it better than iphone 11. all right i feel like this all leads us to a very natural conclusion about the iphone 12 and 12 pros cameras the iphone 11s were incredibly reliable but i was kind of hoping that with the next generation they become more powerful with bigger image sensors we didn't get that but what we did get is a phone that's even more reliable it's addressed pretty much all of the weaknesses that the iphone 11 did have but the lack of power of pure optics of having a massive image sensor is felt but that's where i think the iphone 12 pro max which is going to be released in about a month's time comes in that's apple's competitor to some of the ultra android phones we're seeing that's the phone with a bigger sensor a much better stabilization system and further zoom so if you're someone who's looking to buy a phone right now and camera quality is really important to you then i would wait and see what the 12 pro max has to offer because my guess is that that is apple's true next generation camera system not this one alright if you enjoyed the video a sub to the channel would be absolutely immense my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one youokay so just for a bit of context i've been using the iphone 11 pro as my main phone for about five months now and while i would say it's probably the most reliable camera i've ever used whether you're taking photo or video no matter which lens you're using it looks good i would also say that it's rarely amazing there's been a lot of android phones this year which have come out with massive image sensors they've really pushed phone photography closer to dslr photography so i was kind of sat here hoping that iphone 12 and iphone 12 pro would be when apple followed suit so we ventured high and low we took over 200 shots we even tried filming a music video to properly compare these new iphones to the old iphones real quick by the way i have also launched a pretty big iphone 12 giveaway rules for that are in the description so i wanted to start with this photo taken on the phone's ultrawide cameras because you'll notice something rather unusual here the ultrawide cameras on all these phones are identical but the shots on both iphone 12s look better again here my face is crisper the menu in front of me more defined or here everything from the texture of the floor to the details in the chandelier above me are better on the iphone 12s why well it's because of something called deep fusion so every time you take a photo on one of these iphone 12s it actually captures nine different shots at various different exposures it then goes through all of them and picks the best parts of each of them and merges them now the iphone 11 pro already supports deep fusion on its main and zoom cameras but with the iphone 12s it's better it's faster and it works on all cameras and that also includes the front all three of these phones again have identical selfie cameras and yet the 12 and 12 pro have like a whole extra layer of detail just look at my eyes or the fabric of my coat here there's more if you take a look at the main camera on the iphone 12 and 12 pro while apple hasn't upgraded the sensor like i kind of hoped they would they have given us a better lens to bring in more light this is one of the new iphone's headline features and probably the best way of showing it is by going even darker no not that dark you probably know that with an iphone 11 when the environment gets dark enough and you take a photo it'll automatically spend two seconds or so taking a night mode shot and historically iphones have had good but i wouldn't say the best night mode out there so apple improved it but i gotta say the difference is not as noticeable as i was hoping it would be apple says the new phones capture 27 more light and i could believe that that seems about right in a best case scenario there is less grain on photos everything does look a bit brighter but unless you get really dark it's not the kind of difference you'd even notice without a side-by-side however there are four situations in which the iphone 12's cameras at night really pull ahead number one being the ultrawide camera because while iphone 11 could only use night mode on the main camera iphone 12 can do it on all of them this as you'd expect makes a world of difference you've got more light you've got better textures more object definition you've got the front cameras for the same reason iphone 11 didn't have night mode here iphone 12 does then there's night mode time lapse where if you decide to shoot a time lapse then your iphones can sort of automatically detect night and adjust how they're shooting on the fly to bring in more light accordingly and finally night time portraits but before i get to that i should probably explain lidar so exclusively on the iphone 12 pro you've probably seen that there's a new sensor in the camera module and what it does is fires out infrared waves to figure out how far objects are from you and because we're talking about infrared here this sensor works just as well in the night as it does during the day so while most phones they struggle to get an outline of a person and take a portrait mode shot as the light starts to dip the iphone 12 pro doesn't struggle as much because it has that depth information you'll notice a little bit of an improvement in mid to low lighting conditions bit of extra sharpness bit of extra brightness but if you go to super low light i would say this might just be the use case that is the single most noticeable disparity between these three phones iphone 11 won't activate portrait mode at all it's too dark it doesn't even know what's what iphone 12 might activate portrait mode because it can see a little bit more thanks to the better lens but the iphone 12 pro is the only phone that can activate both portrait mode and night mode at the same time so it ends up way ahead now this is all good stuff i'm really happy that apple has kind of fixed a lot of the caveats that came with the iphone 11's camera like oh you can shoot this but not in this particular mode there's none of that with the iphone 12. however i can't help but wonder why a lot of this stuff isn't available on the 11 pro 2. things like ultra wide night mode android phones have had for years but okay let's just forget about night mode for a second because let's face it 85 percent of your photos are probably going to be during the day time so in these cases is the iphone 12 basically just the same as the iphone 11. not quite so the other thing that iphone 12 has running in the background at all times is the next generation of apple's smart hdr an algorithm that's there to just try and improve photo quality and i would say that it does do a slightly better job of looking at each element within a photo and being like okay we can make this part a little sharper and brighter or okay we can make this part a little softer admittedly it is one of those features that's very easy to kind of roll your eyes at but having compared it to the phone that came before and also some phones that came much earlier it is a feature that makes almost every part of almost every photo you take ever so slightly better so for example in this shot take a look at the brickwork on the left or the leaves on the far right can you see that everything on the 12s is just a little bit better exposed and a little crisper or faces it seems like these new phones can identify faces and just kind of lighten them up a little bit especially if you've got a really bright background behind you the clouds are softer and less grainy looking and often a little better exposed too smart hdr is active on every camera so even when you're taking selfies faces are a little brighter cloud's a little cleaner but you're probably noticing that i'm using the word little quite a lot and that's because while the iphone 12 is better than the iphone 11 for sure a lot of these improvements are so subtle that you have to look for them the iphone 12 camera is what i would call an aggregation of micro refinements another example of this is because of that lidar scanner and this sort of understanding of what's foreground and what's background i'm finding the iphone 12 pro's portrait mode is more confident it really defines the edges of your subject the jumper you're wearing even your hair better than past generations the person almost looks like they're jumping out at you a bit more lidar also helps with focusing it's feeding depth information to the camera so the camera knows what distance to set its focus to a little faster oh and while we're here side note you'll probably have noticed that both pro phones they zoom in when taking portraits that's just because they can really they both have two times telephoto cameras whereas the standard iphone 12 doesn't i definitely prefer the way the pro phones do it also the fact that they have telephoto cameras means that just generally when you're zooming into things on these pros you can get to at least five times before the image starts breaking down now actually one of the biggest features of these new iphone 12s one thing i wouldn't call a micro refinement is what happens to video there's actually two things one of them kind of minor one of them kind of amazing so the first thing is improved optical image stabilization so normally when you move your phone one way your camera lens actually slightly moves the other way to try and keep images still now none of that's changed the core mechanism is the same but with the iphone 12s those corrections are happening 5 000 times per second as opposed to 1000 times per second can i tell when i'm taking video on all these phones not really i'm sure there is a difference i'm sure there are situations where it's more noticeable than others but just generally walking around i can't i even tried running while recording on all three phones squinting at my monitor trying to discern something i couldn't but let me know if you can now what i do think is really cool is the iphone 12 and iphone 12 pro are the first phones in the world to be able to record edit and share in dolby vision hdr sort of and that is not an easy thing to do the phone has to basically record two streams of video at the same time one high exposure one low exposure and on top of that capture something like 60 times the amount of color information and on top of that individually color correct every single frame in real time as you're recording it dolby describes this as as revolutionary as the jump from standard definition to high definition video for me i wouldn't go that far but it does give you a lot of room for maneuver now just bear in mind as i'm showing you this that you're not going to be able to see the full benefits of hdr in this video we've had to kind of compress it so it'll actually work with my video editor but to kind of give you an idea of how it can make a difference let's take this identical video shot on all three phones now if we head into the video editor and dial up the shadows make it brighter crank up the saturation can you see how the video on the iphone 11 is starting to fall apart a bit whereas on the 12s it looks exactly as you'd expect it to i gotta say i have found this hdr content giving me some compatibility trouble with some applications but at the same time i would expect over the coming years this to become more and more adopted as like a a standard format and i should mention while both iphones can record in dolby vision iphone 12 can only do it at 30 frames per second iphone 12 pro can do 60 presumably because of extra ram oh yeah and low light video is better too dolby vision combined with a better lens and an improved image signal processor in the new chip means that if you really did want to film that music video iphone 12 will probably do it better than iphone 11. all right i feel like this all leads us to a very natural conclusion about the iphone 12 and 12 pros cameras the iphone 11s were incredibly reliable but i was kind of hoping that with the next generation they become more powerful with bigger image sensors we didn't get that but what we did get is a phone that's even more reliable it's addressed pretty much all of the weaknesses that the iphone 11 did have but the lack of power of pure optics of having a massive image sensor is felt but that's where i think the iphone 12 pro max which is going to be released in about a month's time comes in that's apple's competitor to some of the ultra android phones we're seeing that's the phone with a bigger sensor a much better stabilization system and further zoom so if you're someone who's looking to buy a phone right now and camera quality is really important to you then i would wait and see what the 12 pro max has to offer because my guess is that that is apple's true next generation camera system not this one alright if you enjoyed the video a sub to the channel would be absolutely immense my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you\n"