Croptical Zoom

Apple prides itself on the camera system on iPhone, particularly on iPhone Pro. They have a long history of stretching the facts, some times too their limits, to describe these camera systems. This year, for iPhone 17 Pro, they’ve gone too far.

Optical-Quality

This year Apple is leaning heavily on the phrase optical-quality. Unfortunately, that phrase has no meaning. All cameras with lenses are governed by the quality of their optics, zoom or not. What they’re trying to convey is “don’t worry that the 8x zoom is a crop of the sensor on the 4x lens, it’s still a high-quality photo.” But insinuating, though not explicitly stating, that these are different optically, is a step too far.

With iPhone 15 Pro, where Apple introduced cropping to emulate the field of view of different lenses, they pitched it as allowing users to “users to switch between three popular focal lengths — 24 mm, 28 mm, and 35 mm.” They didn’t say anything about optical-quality.

It’s true that Apple’s photo processing pipeline means a photo taken in 8x mode will generally be sharper than a 4x photo that you crop after the image is taken. It’s impressive. But Apple should explain that instead of trying to market around it. In practice the 8x mode produces photos of about the same quality as iPhone 16 Pro’s 5x camera.

Apple’s marketing on upgraded cameras… it should be better.