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What the New iPhones’ 3 Camera Lenses All Add Up To
As smartphones increasingly compete on photography, an additional lens gives the iPhone significantly more information about the world around it
The new iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max now have three big, chunky cameras.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of global marketing, announced the new smartphones at a keynote event on Tuesday, boasting that the addition of a new lens adds the potential for greater creativity when shooting images and video with the smartphone. The three cameras are outfitted with a 13 mm ultra-wide-angle lens, a 26 mm wide-angle lens, and a 52 mm telephoto lens.
That allows for 4x optical “zoom,” Schiller noted, between the widest 13 mm camera lens and the longest 52 mm lens. (Technically, the iPhone is switching between lenses rather than actually zooming in or out with any of them.)
Apple also added new software features to its two-camera iPhone 11 versions, including Night Mode, which promises to improve image quality when shooting in much lower light. A software update later this year called Deep Fusion will also give the iPhone 11 Pros the ability to stitch together multiple images to make a higher-resolution final photo.
Schiller described the camera taking eight quick images when the camera button is pressed, and then one longer image, which it uses as a reference to sort through 24 million pixels and assemble the final photo.
While little is known about how these features will work, the patents Apple has filed give a glimpse into where the company is planning to go.
The Pro devices also allow for taking multiple videos at the same time through an app called Filmic Pro, each through a different lens focal length and including the front-facing camera. An example of the feature’s use would be putting the iPhone between two people talking and recording both sides of the conversation from the front- and rear- facing cameras.
Apple started to add more cameras to the back of its phones with the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016. The dual cameras initially…
