Apple could finally be ready to upgrade a major iPhone spec that has remained untouched since 2014.
Major upgrades are in the pipeline for iPhone cameras
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Despite the strong emphasis Apple continues to place on the iPhone’s main camera, the hardware specification lags significantly behind the competition. All of this could change.
According to the latest information from analyst and perennial leaker, Ming-Chi Kuo, the 2022 iPhone flagships will come with an all-new 48-megapixel main camera to take iPhone photography to “a new level.”
According to MacRumors Kuo claims:
“In terms of pixel size, the iPhone 12, iPhone 13 and new 2H22 iPhone are about 1.7um, 2um and 1.25um respectively. We believe that the new 2H22 iPhone supports direct 48MP output and 12MP output (four cells merge output mode) at the same time. With an output of 12 MP, the CIS pixel size of the new 2H22 iPhone increases to about 2.5um, which is significantly larger than the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, and larger than existing Android phones, and close to the DSC level . We believe that the camera quality of the new 2H22 iPhone will take mobile phone camera photography to a new level. “
This suggests that in 2022 the iPhone will soon adopt larger high-megapixel sensors with ‘pixel binning’ technology, a long-established trend with proven results in today’s Android flagships. Kuo claims that the future camera’s expected pixel size of 1.25 microns is larger than existing Android phones, but that wouldn’t put the future iPhone quite at the top of the pile. The current champion with large sensors, Xiaomi’s Mi 11 Ultra, already has an even larger 1.4 micron pixels and is currently ranked first in Dxomark’s camera ranking.
However, if Xiaomi’s results pay off, this major change in the iPhone’s sensor technology will likely cause a generational shift in photographic performance for Apple. In addition to the improved low-light performance that can come from a larger sensor, the higher resolution will significantly improve zoom performance, which remains a serious weakness for today’s iPhones.
48-megapixel recording also paves the way for 8K video recording, which requires frames of around 33-megapixel, far more than the iPhone’s current 12-megapixel limit.
With the addition of this new camera, we can finally see that the iPhone camera is poised to beat the best of the Chinese flagships in raw image quality.
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