iPhone 14 Pro - Finally “Pro”

TheTyle · November 26, 2022

In my opinion, the iPhone 14 Pro is the biggest upgrade in many years. I’ll keep this simple- the biggest upgrade is in the camera.

The Pro iPhone gets a 48mp main camera, finally catching up to the Android realm. It makes a clearly noticeable upgrade. I’ve known some people to blow-up and print photos taken on their iPhones to frame and hang on their walls. Up until now, this has seemed crazy. With the camera quadrupling in resolution, framing iPhone photos may be a bit more sensible. In addition, the new video features are great. Keep in mind, I upgraded from an iPhone SE 2nd Gen. Action mode is legitimately great. I use my phone as a video camera, since it’s great quality in both video and audio make it seem a bit unreasonable to buy a whole new camera for basic video recording. I once had to film a scene where I had to closely follow somebody running down a hill, enough to keep up right next to them. With action mode, it seemed completely stabilized. There was a noticeable drop in resolution, but the scene was short enough so that it was decently unimportant. Every other part of the camera experience was amazing.

The ProMotion display is incredible. People like Linus have stated that once you try a phone with a 120hz refresh rate, you can’t go back. I’ll be honest, that is totally true. My iPad mini 6 seems slightly choppy compared to my buttery smooth iPhone 14 Pro. The dynamic island is one of those small things that really seems to add up in the long term. The animations are so smooth it’s insane. I love the waveform when you’re taking a call. Same with listening to music. It’s great when you’re screen recording too, even though that isn’t a very common scenario for most people. In general, the display on this iPhone is one of the best.

One of my only criticisms is the physical build of the phone. I know it’s meant to be premium, but why does the stainless steel need to be polished? I get it, it looks great in promos and right out of the box, but it’s generally horrible in day-to-day use. It gets so slippery after holding the phone for only a few minutes. The stainless steel is also a fingerprint magnet. They made the back of the phone frosted. It feels like a step back making the rails polished. Unpolished stainless steel like on the iPhone 4 was really nice. Why could they not just bring that back?

All in all, the iPhone 14 Pro is the complete package, being the best iPhone to date. It feels like a much more meaningful upgrade compared to the iPhone 13 Pro. The thing I dislike about many professional reviews of pretty much any device with yearly upgrades is that the reviewers are coming from last years device. Most people don’t upgrade their phone or watch every year. I had the lowest end iPhone from over two years ago, the iPhone SE 2nd Gen. The 14 Pro feels light-years ahead of that iPhone SE. I get that most people aren’t going from the lowest of the low tier iPhone to the top-end, but it doesn’t matter. Any upgrade from before the 12 Pro would be crazy still. The battery on the 14 Pro outlasts that phone by three times. I have to leave my phone off in a backpack all day for school. On low power mode, my SE would be at 50% at the end of the day (6 hours unused). On the other hand, this 14 Pro would be close to 90%. The endurance on this phone is insane. Keep in mind, I’m not even talking about the Pro Max. This is the smaller 14 Pro, with a smaller battery. I can only imagine how long a 14 Pro Max could last.
If you had an iPhone Pro made in the last two years, you might be able to skip this phone. If you have any other iPhone and would be willing to shell out up to $1000 on a new phone, an iPhone 14 Pro is absolutely worth every cent.

LIGISTX · November 26, 2022

39 minutes ago, TheTyle said:

I’ve known some people to blow-up and print photos taken on their iPhones to frame and hang on their walls. Up until now, this has seemed crazy.

You do realize old DSRL's were ~5MP and were used professionally...

Prints are typically 300 DPI, so say someone prints a 21x21 image, thats only 132,000 total dots... the older iphone sensors had 12 Million dots worth of resolution. You can blow a 12 MP shot up preeeeeety large. Again, for reference, a Sony A7iii is "only" 24 MP, and thats a for some people, end game DSLR.

Just wanted to clear this up a bit. 12 MP is a fully viable resolution, and the iphone will typically bin down its 48mp shot to 12mp simply to save space since most people really don't need the file size of a 48mp shot. I shoot a Nikon D850, trust me, I do not want to fill up my iphone with phone pictures as quickly as a 48mp pic would fill it (I have a 14 Pro, its in 12 MP mode for this reason).

TheTyle · November 26, 2022

22 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

You do realize old DSRL's were ~5MP and were used professionally...

Prints are typically 300 DPI, so say someone prints a 21x21 image, thats only 132,000 total dots... the older iphone sensors had 12 Million dots worth of resolution. You can blow a 12 MP shot up preeeeeety large. Again, for reference, a Sony A7iii is "only" 24 MP, and thats a for some people, end game DSLR.

Just wanted to clear this up a bit. 12 MP is a fully viable resolution, and the iphone will typically bin down its 48mp shot to 12mp simply to save space since most people really don't need the file size of a 48mp shot. I shoot a Nikon D850, trust me, I do not want to fill up my iphone with phone pictures as quickly as a 48mp pic would fill it (I have a 14 Pro, its in 12 MP mode for this reason).

You are absolutely right. I am not a camera enthusiast by any means. I don’t fully understand how different megapixel counts affect photos as you seem to. I have the “RAW” toggle in my camera app, so if I’m trying to capture something that I want to have lots of detail, I enable it. I’m an amateur in the camera realm, and noticed a difference between the cropped 12mp and full “raw” 48mp shots and interpreted it as megapixel counts making the difference. I will research how different megapixel counts affect photos quite a bit more soon. Thanks for bringing this up. I’ll try to make sure I know more about camera tech for my next review. Have a nice day!

LIGISTX · November 26, 2022

1 hour ago, TheTyle said:

You are absolutely right. I am not a camera enthusiast by any means. I don’t fully understand how different megapixel counts affect photos as you seem to. I have the “RAW” toggle in my camera app, so if I’m trying to capture something that I want to have lots of detail, I enable it. I’m an amateur in the camera realm, and noticed a difference between the cropped 12mp and full “raw” 48mp shots and interpreted it as megapixel counts making the difference. I will research how different megapixel counts affect photos quite a bit more soon. Thanks for bringing this up. I’ll try to make sure I know more about camera tech for my next review. Have a nice day!

Raw will be a more flat image, not as processed. It’s effectively just the sensor data saved into a file, unlike a jpeg which is an approximation of what the sensor captured. The increased megapixels will make the image better and sharper, but more megapixels doesn’t magically make it better. Again, an a7iii is a end game camera not because of its pixel count, but because of its sensor quality, color science, and how it’s designed (and obviously good glass helps).

If you get something like Lightroom to try and edit the photos with, you will see off the bay the RAW is more flat (less saturation and less vibrance) but you can much more effectively manipulate the image. You’d be able to boost colors more accurately, bring up shadow detail, stuff like that. In the jpeg things will start to look really funky and really bad really quickly. That’s the benefit of RAW. I shoot RAW on my DLSR’s, but not my phone. If my phone was my only camera, that may be a different story tho. Or I would at least selectively pick and choose.

That said, this was shot on iPhone 14 pro in normal mode, I just controlled the exposure in the camera app, and then the edited version is from a quick edit on my phone in Lightroom. So even the standard 12mp mode (not RAW) is pretty incredible for a phone.

LIGISTX · November 26, 2022

But to that point, this was taken on my iPhone Xs, first pic is edited on the iPhone, second was straight out of the camera. It’s still plenty capable

LIGISTX · November 26, 2022

And of course with my actual camera. Also edited on my phone (I have not actually gone in Lightroom on my PC to process my shots from here yet, so I just did a quick edit of one on my phone while I was still on vacation there.