...it’s a fantastic addition, revealing more details without you having to step back

The new iPhone 11 Pro camera, also found on the iPhone 11 Pro Max, is awesome. I mean, really.It has three 12MP sensors, each with different focal lengths: there’s the regular wide lens, a telephoto lens offering an equivalent to 2x zoom and an ultra-wide with the equivalent of a 0.5x zoom compared to the wide lens.This means there is great versatility and it’s possible to get just the image you want in many situations without moving around. The wide and telephoto lenses are on the iPhone 11: it’s the ultra-wide that’s the additional camera here. And it’s a fantastic addition, revealing more details without you having to step back.True, it doesn’t get you right into the action like the 5x zoom on the Huawei P30 Pro , but in many cases, the range of lenses here is highly useful.Apple has included a cute preview system. When you’re looking at what, say, the telephoto lens will snap when you press the shutter button, the surrounding area on screen shows what the wide lens would deliver. If you prefer the look of that, one tap will take you to that lens.Apple doesn’t use the impressive full-screen view that Samsung likes, where the controls appear at the edges and the entire screen shows what the camera sees.The new iPhone Pro cameras (like the iPhone 11) include a startlingly good Night mode. Unlike some phones, this one does not require you to switch to the night setting for it to work. It knows when to deploy it and a small moon symbol appears when it’s needed. In extreme conditions, it will take a series of images and meld them together for maximum effect. When these images are taken over, say, a three-second period, a timer counts down on screen. The timer only appears on the wide and telephoto lenses, by the way.The results are pretty amazing. Apple’s intention is not to replicate what the scene would look like if you had been eating lots of carrots and had outstanding night vision. Instead, it wants to capture how the moment feels. Sure, it does see inhumanly well in the dark, but Apple’s skill is to make the colours look warm without being saturated or unreal.Like rival cameraphones, Apple uses machine learning – others call it Artificial Intelligence – to improve the photos it takes. It’s true that Apple’s photos are often heavily processed but what makes the results so effective is that the company’s photographic engineers have unimpeachably good taste so the results can be just remarkable.Over and over, I took photos with the iPhone 11 Pro which took my breath away for their vibrancy, detail and sharpness.Apple doesn’t have a Pro mode on its cameras. It works on the principle that it should be simple to use, intuitive and, you know, just work. This can lead to frustration from some photographers who may turn to other iPhone photography apps instead.But in a recent holiday in Chile, (thanks for asking: it was awesome), a trip that I really wanted to capture photographically, a curious thing happened. As the week went on, I found myself increasingly shooting on the iPhone and not my SLR. Not because it was more convenient, though in some ways it was, but because each evening as I reviewed my shots, I found the smartphone images were more striking than the dedicated camera. Apple exec Phil Schiller calls this the age of computational photography. If this is what it looks like, I’m in.Video is also outstanding. Apple has long beaten rivals with its superior video recording. This phone shoots at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second (where many phones only manage half that frame rate).Video looks sumptuous and there are even now sophisticated editing capabilities – you can change the aspect ratio of the video on the phone, for instance.Portrait lighting is Apple’s special effect where it blurs the background while keeping the subject in needle-sharp focus. It then adds one of a series of effects such as turning the image into black-and-white and making the background black. Now with a High-Key Light Mono option, there’s a new way to make your portraits look astonishing. The effect cuts around the subject and turns the background bright white. It’s a high-contrast result which doesn’t work in every situation. But when it does, it’s highly eye-catching.The selfie camera on the iPhone has until now never been more than 7MP resolution. Now, it’s 12MP and although there’s only one main front-facing camera, the addition of the TrueDepth camera used for Face ID means it’s possible to get some portrait effects here, too. The improved sensor makes for better selfies, as well as something Apple calls slofies. These are slow-motion video selfies and are quite fun. If you like that kind of thing.And there’s more to come. I haven’t been able to review something Apple calls Deep Fusion, a system designed to really lift images taken indoors in lowish light. The examples I’ve seen of these are pretty impressive but it’s only in the coming weeks, when the feature goes live in an update to iOS 13 that its full effects will be known.Already, though, this is a cameraphone that is very hard to beat.The new wide sensor also boasts 100 per cent Focus Pixels. These are the pixel sites which are designed to not only grab the light but to help with focus, hence the name. When first introduced back in 2014, Focus Pixels were fewer than 10 per cent of the total because, Apple said, that was all that were needed. Now, with 100 per cent Focus Pixels, Apple is saying this is one of the reasons the photos the iPhone 11 Pro takes are so sharp.Is it perfect? No. I kept putting my finger in front of the lens when shooting on the brilliant ultra-wide lens. I will learn not to do this, really I will, but the side-position rather than central mounting found on other phones got in the way of this.And like any other smartphone, it lacks the superior ergonomics of a dedicated camera or the bigger sensor of an SLR.