The iPhone 15 Pro Max is Apple's flagship in their popular line of smartphones, and it brings with a huge range of advanced tools and features sure to please both photographers and filmmakers who want a versatile tool for creating on the go. This great video review takes a look at the phone and the sort of performance you can expect from it in usage.
Coming to you from ZY Cheng, this excellent video review takes a look at the iPhone 15 Pro Max for creatives. Sitting at the top of iPhone 15 line, the Pro Max has a nice range of features, including:
- 48-megapixel 24mm f/1.78 main camera with optical image stabilization
- 12-megapixel ultra-wide 13mm f/2.2 camera
- 120mm f/2.8 telephoto camera with optical image stabilization
- True Tone flash
- Smart HDR 5
- Portrait Lighting with six effects
- 63-megapixel panoramas
- Night mode and Night mode portraits
- Burst mode
- Apple ProRAW
- Macro mode
- 4K video at up to 60 fps
- Cinematic 4K HDR at up to 30 fps
- Action mode 2.8K video at up to 60 fps
- Dolby Vision at up to 4K at 60 fps
- ProRes video recording up to 4K at 60 fps with external recording and 1080p at up to 240 fps.
- Time-lapse with stabilization
- Audio zoom
- Log video
- Academy Color Encoding System
- Stereo recording
- USB-C connectivity
All in all, the iPhone 15 Pro Max looks mightily impressive. Check out the video above for Cheng's full thoughts on the phone.
Let me preface this by saying I do not do any video, ever, for anything.
With that out of the way..
I upgraded from an iPhone XR to a 15 Pro Max. I've always been the type of person who thinks "best iPhone is cheapest iPhone. At the end of the day, they all run the same software, right?
Well my Xr only had one camera, and I really like the idea of a 120mm and a 14mm would be super useful for prelight/scouting jobs, plus I might be able to leave the real cameras at home or at the studio... Well here's the rub: the amount of AI noise reduction and detail reconstruction the iPhone 15 does is so excessive, that the images are full of false detail, and still look like garbage.
I was hoping the 15 Pro Max would be a quantum leap compared to the Xr, and hopefully I wouldn't need to take my little Z30 around as much. Capture One App + Apple Pro RAW + 14-120mm equiv FOV, 512GB of space on it, figured "yeah man, I'm set!". Except that couldn't be further from the truth.
At the end of the day, it's really no different from my Xr aside from being faster in general, and having an awesome OLED monitor. The amount the camera relies on the main 48MP one is EXTREMELY disappointing.
The 5x zoom lens is underutilized depending on EV level or distance. If it's below EV5, the iPhone will use the main camera, crop it, then AI uprez it... WHAT?! WHY?! Just crank the ISO!
Depending on focus distance, again it switches cameras to the main one or the wide-angle one. If you're within 5 feet, it uses the main camera and crops in+uprez's it.
Want to take a hi-res close up? Get bent! Best the phone will do is the 12MP UW cropped down to the normal lens's perspective, then AI upscaled back to 24MP, so your IQ is complete garbage and looks like it was run through Topaz Gigapixel.
I 100% regret my purchase.
The cameras in these things are good for taking snaps to document stuff for work, or friends to just show something quick over text, but to imagine this is a replacement to a real camera, is utterly delusional.
After spending $1500 on a cell phone, I am more confident than ever that the best iPhone is the cheapest iPhone.
I often wonder if you created a camera that has all the tech of phones, how much that would cost and how big it would be.