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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Yeah... I love my iPhone XS Max, partly because it has 2x telephoto--not 2.5x, not 3x or 4x of all the ridiculous things: just a good 2x--and I essentially use that 2x telephoto lens every chance I can. They finally have come up with an iPhone that has brought back 2x telephoto... but as a digital simulation from 1x and thereby only at 12MP, and so it isn't fundamentally different than my existing phone :/. (I do appreciate that the low light abilities are probably better, and maybe that should be worth it to quickly upgrade before they screw up 2x again.)

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The sensor in 2x camera on the older phones was never as nice as the main camera sensor either. It’d be interesting to see a comparison of the optical vs crop cameras for 2x to see if they were able to improve those 12MP at all.

> but as a digital simulation from 1x and thereby only at 12MP, and so it isn't fundamentally different than my existing phone

My understanding is that it's even worse than that, as the 48MP sensor isn't a regular sensor but a Quad Bayer sensor. While there are some benefits over a 12MP sensor, based on what I've read it seems that the image quality is more comparable to a 12MP sensor than to a 48MP sensor. So cropping to 2x would match a 3MP sensor.

That's currently the main reason why I'm planing to keep my 12 Pro a little bit longer. A 2x lens seems more useful than 3x to me and if the assumption above is correct the 2x quality on the 12 Pro should be better than on the 14 Pro. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a lot of discussions regarding this topic, but there's a YouTube video that comes to a similar conclusion: https://youtu.be/u9sJb_E6h5E?t=588.

That’s how MP are always defined, as far as I know.

If you buy a DSLR/Mirrorless camera with a 24MP sensor, there aren’t 24 million R,G,B pixels, but closer to 6 million Red, 12 million Green, and 6 million Blue.

So if that’s how the iPhone is doing their 48MP sensor, then that’s just standard

It's different on the 48MP Quad Bayer iPhone sensor:

Instead of something like RGBRGBRGB for the subpixels the subpixels are layed out as RRGGBBRRGGBB (in both dimensions). So while those additional subpixels provide some additional information (either brightness information or a different exposure time for HDR) in terms of color information the sensor would still be pretty much limited to 12MP. Based on the reviews that I read in the past Quad Bayer sensors seem marginally better than comparable regular sensors (48MP Quad Bayer vs 12MP regular), but nowhere near as good as the MP number makes them look like.

But the sensor the 2x crop is taken from is better than the old real 2x camera. So it should still be better.

For real. Hardware 2x is instant buy.

What's wrong with the 3x ones on the 13 and 14 Pros?

It’s often “too much”. You wish it was zoomed out just a bit more, but if you do that it’s a digital zoom on the 1x lens so you lose quality.

It's an 85mm equivalent focal length, which is comparatively niche (to 50mm, aka "standard" focal length)

85mm is great for head shots, detail shots, video b-roll, etc. and limiting for general use, unless your style is all about subject isolation, telephoto, compression, etc.

Photographers often fall into categories of focal length usage. Some prefer the 24-35mm/85mm pair and skip "normal". Some shoot mainly 50mm. Landscape photographers often shoot 16-35mm and then 70mm+.

My sweet spot is 50-100mm, which was well served by the dedicated 2x camera (I'm often fine with digital zoom—the artifacts are part of the style).

So, they've made a reasonable choice, but 50mm lovers are left out.

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