If you want to hear a love story, ask a photographer about his favorite lens.
They’ll probably get a little sparkle in their eye when they tell you about the fast 35mm they take everywhere or the long portrait lens with the bokeh that hits just right. Camera bodies come and go, but your favorite lens is a lifelong relationship.
Phone camera lenses are a different story. They’re built like a regular camera lens – only very small – and they’re literally everywhere with us. But I don’t know anyone who would wax poetic about the 24mm equivalent wide angle on their iPhone or the 5x telephoto lens on their Pixel. Our relationships with them are much more transactional, and the results have as much to do with the image processing pipelines they are linked to as they do with physical optics.
Photographically inclined smartphone owners may not have a special attachment to those lenses, but they are there Certainly have strong negative feelings about digital zoom. Many photographers prefer to use a native focal length and crop it later in the software, which makes sense if you work with a traditional digital camera. But the latest crop of flagship phone cameras turns that traditional wisdom on its head. Nowhere is this more evident than with three of the best you can buy right now: the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the Google Pixel 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.
I’ve been shooting with them for the past ten days and I’ve come away with two main impressions: the optical zoom still wins, but the digital zoom isn’t as far behind as you might think. And maybe it’s time to switch to digital focal lengths, even if you haven’t felt comfortable using them in the past.
Optical zoom still wins
Let’s get this out of the way: smartphone camera zoom has improved a lot in recent years, but you still get a lot of better quality from a large, traditional camera with a large sensor and a large lens. Computational photography has not conquered physics. But if you compare apples to apples, a traditional zoom lens on a phone is still better than a smartphone’s digital zoom lens, even if there is a lot of extra data and neural networks involved. Take a look at the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new 5x telephoto lens, compared to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 5x, which is between the focal lengths of 3x and 10x optical zoom.
The iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens works well in bright light, but indoors the phone still occasionally switches to the main camera in low light or when your subject is too close for the telephoto’s minimum focusing distance. Sometimes you can get it to switch back to the 5x lens by changing your framing or moving back slightly, which is what I did between the two shots below. And oh, what a difference it makes.
Digital zoom is getting better and better
But even if digital zoom is the only option, there are better approaches than others. At 10x, the Pixel 7 Pro cuts in the center 12 megapixels from the high-resolution 48-megapixel sensor, coupled with the 5x optical zoom lens. The iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x telephoto uses a 12-megapixel sensor, so it can’t do the same at 10x – and the results look a lot more like traditional digital zoom compared to the Pixel 7 Pro.
And then there are the iPhone 15 Pro’s new “focal lengths”: the 28mm and 35mm settings that can be accessed in the camera app by tapping the 1x icon. You can switch between them, disable them, or set one as your new default lens. It’s a version of digital zoom, but with some extra processing in the background. You can read a more detailed explanation in my full review of the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Does this extra processing make a noticeable difference? Kind of. If I take a 35mm photo in decent light and zoom out to 31mm, I can barely make out any more details in the 35mm image. The same applies if I crop a 24mm image instead of using the in-camera zoom to 35mm.
The photos below were taken from the same position; I cropped the 24mm image to match the framing of the 35mm, resulting in an image slightly larger than 12MP. I upgraded that image in Photoshop to match the 24 MP 35mm image (which is what will happen with the typical digital zoom lens) and when I compared the two at 100 percent you can see very fine detail on the 35 mm photo in camera that is more spotty in the crop from 24 mm. Look at the side of the square, clear bottle on the top shelf.
More importantly, using the zoom function in the camera has one important function that cropping later does not: you get to see the framing you want at the moment you take the photo. This isn’t just some high-brow, ‘photo-taking’ nonsense. In my experience, I just “see” photos better when I know what I’m getting before I put them into Lightroom.
Honestly, I’m learning that putting my head in the right space has more impact on my photography than the smallest amount of detail I lose in the process. For example, technically I could capture a slightly better image at 35mm on an iPhone 15 Pro than on an iPhone 14 Pro. But tapping an icon and quickly switching to that 35mm setting removes some of the friction and makes the whole experience more enjoyable – and that’s the real difference maker.