Zoomgate: iPhone 15 Pro Max's Zoom Feature Blurs Quality Expectations

Apple Inc.'s AAPL latest flagship, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, is being touted as a camera powerhouse. Apple even shot the ‘Scary Fast' launch event using its latest top-tier iPhone, but a new iPhone 15 Pro Max camera feature is leading people to question its quality.

What Happened: Apple spent a few moments during its iPhone 15 Pro Max launch presentation to talk about how it has seven different lenses in the same package. Part of it could just be software, according to an analysis and user complaints on Reddit.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max features a triple camera setup – it has a 48MP primary camera, a 12MP periscope telephoto camera, and a 12MP ultrawide angle camera.

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Apple spent a considerable amount of time talking about the periscope camera and how its new technology works. It also supports 5x optical zoom, which is far superior to digital zoom.

The bottom line? The new 12MP periscope telephoto camera's optical zoom should allow users to capture far better photos even if the subject is distant. Optical zoom supports multiple focal lengths and allows you to bring the subject closer by moving the physical parts of the camera.

This results in clearer photos, and there is no loss in image quality.

Digital zoom, however, simply crops the part of the image you want to focus on. This results in a loss in quality, depending on how much you zoom in.

Now, what's happening with the iPhone 15 Pro Max's camera?

According to the findings, when you move too close to a subject, the iPhone 15 Pro Max simply switches to 5x digital zoom instead of using optical zoom.

The end result is the pictures are grainy, and the loss of quality is very visible.

In the example shown above, the image captured using the telephoto camera is not grainy. On the other hand, the digitally zoomed image is visibly grainy.

Apple does this automatically, and unfortunately, users have found out that there is no way to turn off this behavior.

Why It Matters: Apple has been touting the camera prowess of the flagship iPhone 15 Pro Max, going so far as to shoot the ‘Scary Fast' event using the phone.

However, with users being unable to decide when to use digital zoom and optical zoom, the 12MP periscope telephoto camera's 5x optical zoom capabilities are not always utilized, rendering its capabilities underutilized.

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