A few years ago, every iPhone had a camera with a 12-megapixel sensor. Now, every iPhone has one 48-megapixel sensor and one or two 12-megapixel sensors. But a new report claims that the iPhone 16 Pro Max will have a new main sensor and a significantly upgraded ultra-wide-angle camera.
The iPhone 16 Pro Max camera is likely to be an upgrade over the current iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Updated May 26th. This post was originally published on May 23, 2024.
As reported by MacRumors, Weibo user OvO Baby Sauce OvO claims that the main camera will replace the existing sensor with a different one, with a resolution of 48 megapixels. Specifically, this will be the Sony IMX903. According to the leaker, this is an upgrade that will only be available on the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
All of the iPhones coming this year will undoubtedly have great cameras, but as Creative Bloq’s Daniel John puts it, the iPhone 15 Pro Max looks to be “promising.”
The main sensor of the smaller iPhone 16 Pro will continue to be the Sony IMX803, which is also used in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
But there’s one more change that applies to both sizes of the Pro iPhones: the ultra-wide camera, which is predicted to jump from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels.
As always with phone cameras, the main benefit is improved low-light performance, something that small sensors with tiny pixels often struggle with.
And, as Creative Bloq points out, there will also be other changes affecting all three cameras on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the cameras on both the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. This change is to the lenses themselves, which have been redesigned to “reduce lens flare by incorporating a new anti-reflective optical coating technology into the lenses.”
Higher resolution sensors will likely have even smaller pixels, but will almost certainly use a pixel binning process that combines multiple pixel sites as one to let more light in. Specifically, on a 48-megapixel camera, four adjacent sites would be linked together, and binning would give you an image with larger pixels that is the equivalent of a 12-megapixel shot.
It’s a process that works brilliantly with the main camera on the current iPhone range, and it also gives you extra flexibility, as you also have the option to shoot at the full 48MP resolution in the highest quality if lighting conditions allow.
That means that the only thing that will remain the same this year on the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the 12-megapixel sensor and the telephoto camera that’s equivalent to 5x optical zoom, but there are rumors that the iPhone 16 Pro will have improved performance compared to this year’s model.
The iPhone 15 Pro only gets 3x zoom, but we’re told that’s because there wasn’t enough space to fit the Max’s 5x zoom in. Apparently that will change this fall, when both Pro sizes will get the same excellent 5x zoom that’s currently in the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
In fact, the Pro Max’s telephoto lens may even be getting an improvement this fall. As Creative Bloq points out, the iPhone 16 Pro Max could have an “ultra” telephoto zoom, increasing the focal length from 77mm to 300mm, which is obviously much longer. The report states that “the improved zoom capabilities will be a big boon for creatives, and also make the device a viable candidate for sports and nature photography.”
