Every year Apple’s iPhones get seemingly more jam-packed with clever features, many of which I think would be incredibly useful in a professional camera body.
While Apple’s iPhone can’t match the quality of a large APS-C or full-frame sensor and its ability to change lenses, swap batteries or memory cards, which are all desirable qualities for a working professional. The iPhone doesn’t compete with cameras in these fields, of course Apple’s silicone gets more efficient each year and so battery life is extended, and while you can’t physically swap your lenses, you can change between the three lenses for ultra wide, wide, and telephoto on the Pro and Pro Max models.
Apple’s iPhone has no need to compete with professional larger format camera sensors, it mitigates the limitations of its smaller camera sensors using clever AI software.
The iPhone 17 employs a main 48MP camera with a 1/1.28” sensor, that’s roughly four times smaller than an APS-C camera, or about 12 times smaller than a full-frame camera – this has a significant effect on its shallow depth of field and light gathering capabilities, but Apple knows these drawbacks well and uses clever software to get past its shortcomings.
The AI in the iPhone does an incredible job of producing images with a fantastically well balanced exposure using its clever Smart HDR and Deep Fusion functions to merge multiple exposures and extract detail from shadows and retain bright highlights. It also has impressive noise reduction for clean photos even in low light and vibrant bold colors – all optimised for viewing on small smartphone and tablet screens via social media. In this scenario, the iphone’s images are often good enough to go, or require minimal processing before uploading directly to socials from the phone.
Professional cameras are better for producing higher quality images that can be edited further with larger RAW files, greater dynamic range and pictures that can be blown up larger and will stand up much better to printing or viewing at large sizes – particularly important for professional photographers looking to print at big sizes such a A2, A1, A0 and beyond.
Due to the iPhone’s small sensor they’re great for pictures with a deep depth of field – so they’re brilliant for landscapes or group photos. It’s much harder to catch great sharp group photos with a professional camera because you’ll need to understand how aperture works and close it down to f/8 or /11 and then balance your exposure with shutter speed, ISO and potentially even flash to make sure the quality and exposure look good. Images on an iPhone, or indeed most smartphones, are inherently sharp due to their small sensor sizes.
For this reason a shallow depth of field is hard to achieve, but iPhone uses its AI once again to artificially blur the background with its post capture focus and depth controls. I still think this looks noticeably fake in most scenarios, but it’s getting better with every generation and I’m sure we’ll be in uncanny valley territory any day now.
One super clever AI feature I’ve become obsessed with on iPhone is Visual Look Up, which scans your photos and detects what’s inside them and searches the net to give you heaps of information on all sorts of subjects from nature, animals, landmarks, art, book, food and even translated text. A similar and newer feature on the iPhone 16 and beyond called Visual Intelligence works in real-time on your camera and scans your surroundings such as restaurants or businesses for more information.
The biggest feature where iPhone’s have the edge of professional cameras is that the photos are shot on the smartphone itself, edited in-phone and can be edited further via apps, but essentially they’re ready to go and be uploaded to social media – which is where the majority of images are headed.
For professional cameras we need to get the photos from the camera body to a phone or computer to upload them and this has always been a sticking point. While it’s admittedly better now with faster WiFi and Bluetooth connections, it’s still an extra step and one that’s governed by manufacturer’s apps which don’t always have the best reputation. As pictures on the iPhone are already on the device it has the most streamlined pipeline between pressing the shutter button and uploading to socials – this is something camera manufacturers simply can’t compete with, and smartphones aren’t capable of storing all of the massive files that take up multiple memory cards.
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