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Like he did last year for the iPhone XS, Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of the iOS camera app Halide, has again made use his app’s technical readout feature to obtain additional camera specifications above and beyond what can be found in the official spec sheet. He’s broken down the data and compared the new iPhone 11 Pro to last year’s XS model. Let’s have a closer look at his findings:
The 11 Pro main camera comes with a 6-element lens that offers a 26mm equivalent focal length and F1.8 aperture. The chart below details the changes between the XS and the new model. As you can see the base ISO on all of the camera modules has increased by half a stop, the maximum shutter speed has been increased from 1/22,000 sec to a whopping 1/125,000 sec and the maximum ISO has been expanded to ISO 3072 vs the previous ISO 2304 limit, coinciding with the increased base ISO level.
It’s not quite clear at this point what the blisteringly fast shutter speeds could be used for. The increased maximum ISO doesn’t necessarily mean that the new iPhone will produce lower levels of image noise at a given ISO setting but it should be able to achieve better exposures in very dark settings.
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| Apple iPhone XS versus 11 Pro main camera comparison, source: Halide |
As before, the telephoto cameras features a 52mm equivalent focal length but now comes with a faster F2.0 aperture. This should improve low light tele photos and should also produce a more visible ‘natural’ bokeh than on the iPhone XS.
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| Apple iPhone XS versus 11 Pro tele camera comparison, source: Halide |
The iPhone XS did not come with an ultra-wide camera, so we can’t compare but the new camera offers a 13mm equivalent field-of-view, an F2.4 aperture lens and phase detection AF.
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| Apple iPhone 11 Pro ultra-wide camera specifications, source: Halide |
The front camera has been updated, too. It now features faster shutter speeds, a higher maximum ISO, larger image output size and a wider field-of-view.
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| Apple iPhone XS versus 11 Pro front camera comparison, source: Halide |
Overall the hardware changes don’t look too impressive on paper, but they are of course only a (small) part of the whole story as Sebastiaan points out in the blog post:
‘It’s kind of unbelievable that even with the glowing reviews out today, Apple has said that there’s more software processing yet to come. We’re told Deep Fusion is a very big leap in post-processing quality, but with the changes to Smart HDR, Semantic Mapping in the imaging pipeline and discrete situational processing like Night Mode, these specs are the furthest from the whole story on the new iPhone cameras yet.’
The Halide app is available from the iOS App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch and will set you back $ 6.
Image credits: Charts used with permission from Sebastiaan de With, developer of Halide.
Updated (September 19, 2019): Edited to clarify the increased ISO ratings and base ISO levels.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)