Last year, before the iPhone XS hit the store shelves, we took a look at the changes in camera hardware on the iPhone XS compared to the iPhone X. We can do this thanks to Halide’s Technical Readout feature.

Much like last year, some kind individuals have shared a few technical readouts with us from iPhone 11 Pro (and iPhone 11) units in the wild.

A few words before we dig in:

Why just the iPhone 11 Pro?

The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro use the same kind of camera system apart from a key difference: the Pro gains a telephoto camera. All camera, sensor and performance specifications appear identical across the board, so there’s no need for us to compare the iPhone 11 to the iPhone XS. Performance-wise, though, the iPhone 11 looks to be a much better camera than the iPhone XS.

These are just the hardware specs

Every year, cameras including those in your iPhone become far more powerful thanks to both hardware changes and accompanying software processing.

Incremental hardware improvements enable cool new features, but the real magic is increasingly in the software. We’ll follow up with a look at the work that is being done to turn simple raw sensor data into such good images. This year, iPhones can do multi-second long exposures by fusing possibly dozens of frames at night. It will analyze separate parts of the image semantically and render them differently to maximize detail. This is a machine learning camera.

What’s New?

The ultra wide-angle lens and sensor.

Photography defines ‘ultra-wide’ as wider than a 15mm equivalent focal length. What does that mean? That means it’s very wide; it can capture twice as much field of view as your iPhone XS’ regular wide angle lens, which already got a bit wider last year compared to the iPhone X.

13mm is very comparable to an existing type of camera: the action camera, and in particular GoPro. GoPro cameras, depending on their mode, are pretty close to 14mm.

This is a shot taken with a 16mm lens on a full-frame sensor.

This is a shot taken with a 16mm lens on a full-frame sensor. iPhone 11 Pro’s field of view will be even wider; you could totally use this chest-mounted when mountain biking.

iPhone XS used two different size sensors: the sensor in the main (wide) camera was a bit bigger and better than the one in the telephoto sensor, which meant photos in Portrait mode or some telephoto shots wouldn’t be quite as good.

This is sadly still the case, and both the ultra wide-angle and telephoto lenses use smaller, slightly worse sensors in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro compared to the sensor they use in the regular ‘wide’ camera.

Of note is that the sensor seems to be lacking some ‘skills’ the other sensors have: it clearly has less dynamic range in some reviewer sample shots, and Matthew Panzarino mentions a lack of focus pixel coverage and as such, does not do Night Mode. That also means you won’t be able to do Portrait Mode (yet…?) with it. It also lacks OIS (Optical Image Stabilization), though ultra wides fortunately suffer far less from errant camera movement because of their large field of view.