Iphone 15

[Rob C]

Rob, why would that matter?

From my understanding of the matter, if the longer lens had its own sensor, then I’d imagine (quite possibly wrongly) that the lens would have access to more pixels from which to form its images, instead of having to work by electronically scaling up from a small part of the image created via a wider lens? In other words, it would arrive at a bigger original thus offering better quality than by scaling up from something small.

As I suggest, this thinking may be totally wrong - I’ve never been an electro-mechanical whizz.

[Rob C]

@Rob C
Rob, welcome back - good to see you posting again.

Thank you, nice to be here right now. Feels odd how many old faces are no more. Did we die off or just gravitate elsewhere? I used to enjoy a blog called Leicaphilia, by a chap called Tim; a wonderful eye for the gritty, everyday public secrets of the reality of what the American broken dream seems to be. On top of that, he had a wonderful way with words, and his writing was as much the attraction as his photography. Sadly, cancer came a-knocking and he has gone on that long road trip up yonder. In the end, everything fades away.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... the longer lens doesn't have its own sensor...

Rob, I perhaps didn't phrase my question correctly the first time, so here it goes again: what makes you think it doesn't have its own sensor? Can you point out that specific detail in the reviews referenced above?

Technical details aside, I can assure you, from personal experience, that images from iPhone 15 Pro Max that I have are absolutely fabulous, including the telephoto ones.

[digitaldog]

This appears to explain that the lens in question does have its own sensor:
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2668153890/apple-s-iphone-15-and-15-pro-imaging-tech-examined

The iPhone 15 Pro Max 5x Telephoto camera

There’s one sensor that didn’t gain more megapixels: the new telephoto camera found only on the iPhone 15 Pro Max is a 12MP sensor with 1.12µm pixels. This is a 4.5x3.4mm sensor, 25% larger than the 4x3mm one found in the iPhone 14 Pro's telephoto camera, which helps when receiving the light that’s been bounced and focused through the four angles of an internal tetraprism, creating a 120mm equivalent focal range. The lens doesn’t offer an actual zoom mechanism.

[fdisilvestro]

The longer lens does have its own sensor. It is the intermediate focal lenghts (28, 35, 50mm) that are crops of the main camera.

[Rob C]

Slobodan, digital dog and fdisilvestro: thanks for setting me straight re. the sensor and tele lens situation. As I indicated, not my forte at all. I just like things that let me do what I want, and don't drown me in science. (I always liked art more than chemistry and physics, clearly a definite shortcoming these days!)

Truth to tell, and as I have mentioned in the site before, if photography had been digital back when I was in my teens, I'm pretty sure that I would have left it well alone. Nothing I've done digitally has ever given me the buzz of that first darkroom print, in spite of getting some pretty good black/whites from my dead, discontinued and dumped HP A3+ machine. The problem with it, as far as I can analyse my discontent, is that with digital it just feels like painting by numbers, not by gut instinct.

I suppose I'll wait and see what future iPhones come up with...

Slobodan: I remember being highly impressed by a portrait you posted somewhere of a pair of girls in a nightclub. Great atmosphere, and who (in such a scenario) gives a damn about how good a particular lens might or might not be: it's the content that matters most of all.