iPhone 14 vs 14 Pro: Do 48 megapixels matter?

[Music] Apple has never had such a big difference between their regular iPhone and the pro model but this year they are radically different the 14 didn't get many huge upgrades meanwhile the pro has been changed in almost every way so we're gonna go test them side by side see which one is right for you [Music] every year I do a comprehensive review of the updates to the latest iPhone camera this year Apple's making me do it on hard mode usually the pro and the regular iPhone are so similar that I can just mention the differences and kind of interchange them as I test but this year look at the spec differences the iPhone 14 pro comes with some radically different features than the iPhone 14 so I thought before I do all the tests showing us how much we've evolved since older iPhones let's figure out where are we this year with these two excellent cameras you might be surprised actually I know you're going to be surprised at the differences and the lack of differences we spent all day and night running around taking test photos so let's start by looking at some comparisons I'll generally keep the 14 on the left and the 14 pro on the right if I try to kind of look throughout the image they are both very sharp there's really nothing that stands out to me that's radically different here the headline features that the pro now has a 48 megapixel sensor that is generally down sampling to 12 megapixels so if we just zoom in here you can see overall the detail is pretty similar but between the two now if I punch into 300 I can see that the detail on her bag and her arm is more present there is a little more detail visible on the 13 Pro it's not substantial Skyline shots are great for analyzing detail and first thing I noticed is that you can see that the pro is now slightly wider it's 24 millimeter lens shows a little more of the frame than the 26 millimeter of the iPhone 14 and then the moment of truth if we zoom in I mean it's not a crazy difference if we look around the edges of frame I mean detail is about the same here I mean this is interesting so the 14 got a larger sensor as well they did both improve that it's not like there wasn't any changes to the 14 but you know the results here in a well-lit bright daytime image comes out pretty comparable there's nothing jumping out of me that's radically different here I noticed the iPhone 14 pro has a little less noise being removed from the sky so it's not quite as smoothed out but first impressions not a huge difference here the iPhone 14 pro also supports Apple's Pro raw so if we zoom in here this is a true 48 megapixel file and I do feel like this detail is real I was kind of expecting it to look like I don't like mushy when it was at a full 40 megapixels but it actually looks really solid let's quickly remind ourselves of some of the feature differences between the 14 and 14 pro other than all those megapixels the pro features in always on display so you can always see your background image the time and any widgets that you put on the home screen and the display also has a higher Peak brightness which we can see when we're testing It Outdoors the regular phone has the same Notch that we're used to at the top of the screen where the pro features the new hilariously named Dynamic Island which has really beautiful animations and is a very nice design touch and a few camera features that are exclusive to the pro it features a second gen Optical stabilization so the sensor is more stabilized than on the 14. it's got adaptive true tone flash so they both update the color temperature but on the pro it's going to change the spread of The Flash depending which lens you're using only the pro features macro mode and file formats like prores for really high quality video or if you want to edit your images and push them really far Apple Pro raw looking at this more colorful example with Anya you can see an interesting effect of the raw files and that's that Lightroom is interpreting it very differently than the way that the iPhone does on its own so now that it's raw it's up to the interpretation of whatever software you use so every software is going to do it slightly differently and at this sort of zoomed out thumbnail size I actually prefer what the raw image looks like it's a little bit softer it has less of that like aggressive sharpening that we're used to from phone photos and again as I zoom in and move around I mean this detail feels much more substantial I mean this already surprises me a little bit I was expecting to say that you're always going to see a bit of a difference but raw won't emphasize it as much that's not what happened raw really seems to bring out the additional detail that's hiding inside that 48 megapixel file also just look at her pants for a second this is how the iPhone interprets it and it's very contrasty it kind of looks like the oranges are starting to clip but if we look at the raw file it's much softer and I find more natural this is more like what a mirrorless or DSLR photo would look like these two were taken in portrait mode it's used pretty subtly here if we zoom into a hundred percent detail looks pretty similar looking at this in person I can see a fraction more detail in her pants in her shirt but if we Zoom right in on her hat I wouldn't be able to tell you which one of these came from which sensor I think we're starting to see a pattern here if we look at one more zoom in to 100 again not a huge difference between the two of these especially if these were going to social media I couldn't tell you which one was coming from the pro so if you're mostly shooting in well-lit environments with the main lens looks like you're not going to see a big difference to the iPhone 14. now I know there will be some differences so let's dig a little bit deeper here okay so super random we were just outside shooting and people just invited us into this crazy event space something's happening in like an hour but they've set up amazing lights that are perfect for testing out the iPhone 14. cool so thanks to KPMG for letting us shoot in their event this was a pretty cool space to shoot in and we started testing one specific feature here that's new to iOS 16 and that's foreground blur so here is the iPhone 14 pro and here's the iPhone 14 and you can see the portrait mode is blurring out the background just like it always has but now it's also blurring out her hand in the foreground this really adds to the realism of this looking like true depth of field so adding extra elements to your scene can really take it further now and looking at these two side by side the pro responded a little bit differently they were both interpreting the light in slightly different ways and looking closely they are both doing a great job Apple spent a lot of time in the keynote talking about the photonic engine and I'm still not really clear what that means but it is having an effect here what they've done is they move deep Fusion to process the image in this medium low light like this example so it's extracting all those details before the image is compressed I'd still like to know more details about what's going on this photonic engine but it it's clearly having a positive effect today I was generally seeing more natural results from those deep Fusion examples and while we were in the space I had to try out the new selfie lens this is in portrait mode still doesn't do the best job of cropping out hair but you know it looks pretty good overall and same thing this is medium low light and you know it looks like a very clean image I'm really glad that they've been improving that selfie lens because it's one of the most used lenses on a camera for all content creators I mean think of tick tock for example and Ani helped with some more testing the selfie camera it is the same on the iPhone 14 and it's added autofocus before it was just focusing to Infinity forever but now it means that both people in your frame are going to be sharp and the 14 pro so you don't have to worry about that they have both been updated they're both bigger sensors faster lenses and it's making an improvement here everything does look sharper let's take a detour to talk about the video performance on these now it's very similar between the two of them I'm not going to spend very long comparing the 14 to 14 pro because they're doing most of the same things I just want to first of all appreciate how excellent the 4K quality still is and I really appreciate that they've added 24 frames per second cinematic mode which is something I was asking for in my review last year so maybe I'll start to use cinematic mode a little more often one trick that I think can help with that is in preferences you can set it to remember what you set the f-stop to last time so for example I don't like it at 2.8 and I was tired of always changing it to something like f8 later so I can just have it remember my previous setting the award for most impressive video feature definitely goes to action mode now I saw a few other people testing this in their videos and it seemed like it wasn't making that big of a difference between the regular stabilization and that's because stabilization is always on by default so there is a way to turn it off and I did that so these two cameras are strapped together they're moving exactly the same way and one of them has all of the stabilization turned off which you can do with apps like filmic Pro the other one is running action mode you're going to see that it is cropping in a lot it brings 4K video down to to 2.8 K which I think is totally reasonable it also defaults to using the ultra wide lens which I don't prefer it doesn't look as good so maybe when you're in full sunlight and you need to be wide but my examples I liked the way that the 1X cropped in for Action mode looked the most it was really impressive I think this is getting pretty close to what DJI and GoPro are doing I posted this as a reel over on my Instagram which you want to go over there and follow me it's at stelman and a few people commented that like oh well Samsung has already done it I was watching the test comparing this to Samsung's version and I'm sorry but it just blows away the 22 Ultra here's another photo kind of in medium light we're in the shade also exposing for outside but I'm noticing a bit of a pattern in some of these that when I look at the fine textures it does feel like the iPhone 14 is sharpening it a little bit further and this probably isn't coming across in YouTube and now that it's made everything more confusing let's search for some more details so this image on the Right comes from the iPhone 14 pro and it is raw so if we zoom in this is a true 48 megapixel file so what I'm looking at here is for example this texture in the cement there's a lot more contrast to it on the iPhone 14 making it feel sharper there's more detail there's more going on but as I zoom out the softness of the raw image is definitely preferable to me this is more what film look like or this is what how I would process my larger sensor photos so I don't know that's kind of a testament to Raw maybe more so than the megapixels but again as I zoom in like the detail holds up I I really expected these Raw photos to look less impressive than they do but they're really nice here's a one-off just I thought this is a nice photo it's using portrait mode on the telephoto on the iPhone 14. you can see that it is still blurring her hair a little bit there but you know it's still a great effect usually you just need to turn it down a bit so that it doesn't ruin too much hair another trick Apple's doing to megapixels is now there is a two times Zoom so it's actually cropping into the 12 megapixels in the middle of the sensor instead of scaling up those smaller pixels let's see the difference between the 14 and 14 pro even when they're not zoomed in I can already see it there's a bit of noise and lack of detail happening here under her hat and if I zoom in yeah that's definitely a difference there definitely is a lot more noise going on in that scaled up iPhone 14 image I will say I've heard some people that are experts about tech describe this as that it's actually an optical zoom because it's using a real part of the sensor and really is using the lens no photographer would call that any kind of Zoom it's it's just cropping your image it looks better it definitely looks better than cropping the 12 megapixel sensor but it's it's still not zoom and the three times lens still looks better so looking at that three times Zoom the 77 millimeter lens that's only on the pro it's a lot cleaner this is this is a much Sharper Image I still want that lens to get better because it's far from perfect and probably softer than any of the other lenses on the pro but I've been using it a lot on my 13 Pro and I'm going to keep using it on the 14 a lot more than that two times what has had a big update is the ultra wide lens this has never been updated if on the regular 14 and it's one of the biggest reasons I'd actually go with the pro I use that lens a lot and it's showing its age so in this example we're in bright sunlight overall not seeing a crazy difference here let's take a photo that has a little less light this is shot in the shade and even without zooming in I can see a huge difference here just take a look at the concrete it's like Smooth like ice whereas all the texture is preserved on the iPhone 14 pro I find this a little frustrating that they're not moving that Ultra wide lens for it at all on the regular iPhone 14 it needs an update a lot of people use and love this lens actually if you're considering the 14 and what you're wearing about is missing out on the telephoto lens I think the ultrawide is much more useful more people end up using it more of the time but it needs an update so I really wish you'd be moved forward at least if it had the same update the iPhone 13 Pro had last year because these results they're not great and in a moment we'll take a look at some very low light photos where you'll see more of a difference but first macro mode another huge addition since the iPhone 13 Pro Anya has been going crazy with it so you can see this is the flower that she's taking a photo of and this is how close she can get and all year honestly she's been taking so many amazing macro photos and if we compare it to the iPhone 14 well there's no comparison it just can't auto focus so you can't get close to an object with that Ultra wide lens I did do a comparison to the iPhone 13 Pro which you're seeing on the left compared to the iPhone 14 pro on the right first of all it's just cool to find what's hiding in flowers but this example which is a more boring photo better shows the difference we zoom in to 300 here you can see there's way more detail going on in the texture of that pedal so that larger sensor and new lens on the ultrawide is making a big difference for macro photography as well actually I like this example because the left is the 14 so it can't focus close enough but both of them are interesting in their ways I like these picks and now the lights are going to get a little bit lower this first example I don't see a big difference in terms of sharpness so even when I zoom in what I actually see it's more about the saturation roll off as we move from the darker to lighter side of the face the larger sensor is just a little smoother at handling this color information it's a subtle detail but you can see it even when you're zoomed out I'd also call this photo low light it hasn't quite reached night mode yet if I zoom in I can see a sharpness difference tell me in the comments if you can on YouTube because it's subtle and I don't even know if it's going to translate honestly I expected these photos to to see more of a difference this example I think pops out a little bit more if you don't see it in the detail of the wood up here you're definitely going to see it in the texture of the grass the iPhone 14 is relatively mushy where all the detail is fully preserved in the fourth team pro one thing I'm disappointed we still have to deal with is the lens flares in low light I know this is a huge challenge but I'm going to bring it up every time until Apple finds a way to reduce them or maybe eliminate them if we're lucky this one's even lower light and actually this one I don't really see much of a difference yeah no this one is night mode and it's not really more noise or banding in the sky it's exposed a little bit brighter on the 14 pro but not a big difference these two are portrait night mode so two modes combined I can see more detail for sure in the undershirt and the blue shirt both of them are popping more obviously there is more saturation in the Pro and also if I look at the sky it just has less noise um overall it is cleaner I think this one is a pretty clear win for the 14 pro now if we look at the ultra wide in these lighting conditions oh now there is a huge difference the 14 looks bad it's it's too low of light it's really just stressing it out I mean you can post this anywhere other than Snapchat and we just focus on the 14 pro for a second I'm pretty happy with this this is a big improvement over what we saw in the 13 Pro it's hard to make Ultra wide lenses really fast they're actually rare to come by and so having it work well in low light like this is impressive and I want them to keep pushing it here's another ultrawide there's a little more light in this one so I think the difference is less exaggerated but still it's definitely much sharper on the 14 pro it's got less aggressive noise removal you can see on the 14 there is some artifacting around the cables of the bridge the 14 pro has also had updates to its true tone flash so now it's adaptive depending which lens you use it works differently looking at a sample with the main lens The Flash kind of performed similarly it's a little brighter on the 14 pro and if we zoom in the 14 pro is just noticeably sharper that's nice looking at all these tests I see a very modern and mature camera system and whether you pick up the 14 or the 14 pro you're going to be in a pretty good place if you don't need some of those Pro features you could save a few bucks and still get great photos out of your 14. after the keynote we all kind of felt like the 14 just didn't get updated and that's just not true it does have a larger sensor and a better lens so now would be a good time to subscribe so that you remember to see all the tests to the older iPhones if you're using something like an iPhone 11 or 12 this will help you know if you need to update but for now if you want your photos to look better you can also just edit them to look better that's what I do to everything that I post and I did an in-depth video breaking down every single professional or semi-professional editing app on the iPhone so that's the video you can watch right now to improve your photography and I'll see you over there guys [Music]

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 538,423

Keywords: Tyler Stalman

Id: QCRnwsFi2gY

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022