The zoom function on phone cameras has always been largely pointless to me. Digital zoom has traditionally yielded such dreadful results that I have avoided it at all costs; I'd rather not bother with the shot than use the longest zoom on a phone. However, technology is making strides as always and Apple is often at the forefront of that when it comes to mobile phones. Now, we have optical zoom that's longer reach than we're used to seeing.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max has a new zoom lens that is being called the "5X", but for photographers, it equates to around 120mm. "For iPhone 15 Pro Max, we designed a 5x Telephoto camera with the longest optical zoom of any iPhone ever to fit in our compact Pro camera system." The issue is, it's still a tiny element that runs nearly flush to the back of the camera — how good can it be optically?
Well, I'll let Sidney Diongzon give you a comprehensive breakdown, but without having tried it myself, it looks to perform exactly how I'd expect: passable in excellent lighting conditions, unusable in every other scenario. This puts it in the "nice to have" camp for me again, but what do you think?
The 5X lens works fine. The problem I have with it is that it displaced the 3X lens, so everything from 1X to 4.9X is a digital crop. Image quality gets really awful between 3X and 5X (about 70 to 119mm), which are more commonly used focal lengths than 5X+.
Apple really needs a 2X or 3X lens between the 1X and 5X. "Quadpixel" and AI sharpening algorithms aren't cutting it.
Calling it a "5x zoom lens" is a completely different thing to what those words used to mean.