Gadgetory

pocket now's iPhone 7 coverage is brought to you by D brand to buy the best fitting skin for your phone or tablet please visit D brand calm here we go we're looking at what will likely be the two most popular models of phones released in 2016 we'll be combining this review to include both the iPhone 7 and 7 plus their premium priced devices so let's see if Apple brought the heat for these improved cameras first a little housekeeping the sensors employed here are similar to last year's iPhone 6s a 1/3 inch 12 megapixel sensor what's new for this year is a wider aperture now F 1.8 and even the smaller iPhone has optical image stabilization the exciting new features on the 7 Plus which now has a second camera sensor used to create a 2 X zoom this is a smaller sensor approximately one over three point six inch to pair up with a longer lens but still fit the same housing as the main camera jumping right into our exposure tests in good light we see little difference in still photo performance from last year's iPhone even down to the incredibly consistent image processing blues and greens are well captured providing terrific saturation clarity and detail skies can be a bit grainy but we don't see the blockier compression issues found on some other phone cameras browns and earth tones are rich and vibrant but again Apple prevents these colors from becoming exaggerated or orangish yellow flowers in direct Sun are holding on to find petal details with only a few hot spots starting to clip information and Red's are always tough but the iPhone does better than most and providing reasonable exposure and pleasant but even-handed saturation so these flowers aren't completely washed out Apple's spot metering helps rein in the exposure on white flowers and afternoon light I'm happy to see that once you tap to focus the phone will allow darker areas to stay underexposed when you tell the camera what's important in your frame one thing we noticed a bit more on this iPhone noise reduction can be applied fairly aggressively in shaded shots there's still plenty of light here for a clean photo but the iPhone is compressing this down and producing an image which is starting to look a little comic book II once you zoom in now talking about white balance the iPhones image processing is amazingly consistent and the iPhone handles warmly very well delivering a delicious balance between golden hues and the actual color of your subject however we still think this camera over reacts in shade where there's really no need to push this cold we're still surrounded by warm California afternoon light and we'll have a little more to say about this when talking about the iPhones video looking at dynamic range there's not a lot of info to work with once the iPhone finishes compressing a JPEG these are tiny files and it's rare to see a full res iPhone photo over 4 megabytes and most are under - there's enough info to slap a filter on top but trying to rescue clipped highlights is usually futile however this is the first iPhone to support raw capture but not from the Apple camera app we had to break our rule here and shoot some samples from a third-party camera app to look at some RAW files average raw photos were between 9 and 12 Meg or roughly half the size of a galaxy s7 raw photo RAW files aren't the prettiest to look at but they provide a lot more info for folks who might want or need to edit blowing out the highlights of this pinecone shot it's pretty easy to walk this back a stop and a half and recover the picture this would be completely impossible from the finished JPEG now we're not going to spend a lot of time on the iPhone app layout it hasn't changed significantly in features or organization what is new though is this toggle here to switch the zoom on the 7 plus it's a handy quick action to get you closer to your subject and speaking of that zoom it's a really fun feature to have photos from the 7 plus second sensor aren't quite as nice as from the main sensor the smaller sensor size and aperture affect the shots and in some lighting conditions output can look similar to a selfie camera but that's often still preferable to just a straight-up cropped zoom while the full 10x range can still wreck image integrity staying below that maximum zoom delivers a much higher quality reach than any other phone we've reviewed short of a Lumia 1020 this is a boon to macro shooters we're very happy to see the zoom lens has the same minimum focusing distance as the main lens the iPhones close focus is still a ways off from some of its competitors but the second sensor more than clears that gap often when you change a lens's focal length that affects how close you can get now this might be one benefit of using a smaller sensor on the zoom lens being able to maintain exactly the same focusing range for photos and videos the iPhones wider aperture helps blur your background a little bit more than what we could achieve on the iPhone 6s but the one-third inch sensor still keeps the iPhone from playing with the same bulk a we can generate from androids and Lumias with larger image sensors and at the time this review was shot Apple had yet to release the software to blur the backgrounds on the seven-plus so we'll have to cover that feature when it's released in a separate video if there's any core improvement to get really excited about it's the spruced up focusing system the iPhone 7 locks on smoother and more consistently than the iPhone success even when shooting in low-light situations we had far fewer miss focuses than when reviewing the iPhone S II no manufacturer can compare to what Samsung is doing this year but this system gets Apple within striking distance of many laser assisted Android phones and it makes the camera easier to trust in run-and-gun situations one area where Apple still rules the roost HDR photos are as good as they've ever been which is to say they are excellent Apple does a fantastic job of balancing shadow and highlight detail where many other manufacturers will just abuse color saturation and clip highlights and panorama performance is also still quite good but our iPhone 7 plus was prone to more small stitching errors than we saw in the iPhone 6s a very minor but still noticeable step back in performance here but back to another wind the new front-facing camera on the iPhone is far more usable than previous FaceTime cameras and finally outputs 1080p video stills are very sharp in many lighting conditions though we still wish apple with loosen up a bit and give us a wider lens you know your face is going to be nicely captured but I don't quite have long enough arms to also get enough of the background in my shot for a good vacation and photo now the hardware changes like image stabilization and wider apertures don't help as much in bright light but moving the darker scenes the iPhone gets a solid step up improving low-light photos we get better contrast and while noise reduction is certainly cranking you kinda have to push to that pixel peeper range to see really destructive blurring so just don't crop in that severely and you'll be fine even without resorting to HDR we get great color in a dark street scene our creepy tunnel shows off a tack sharp lens free of flaring and fringing just look at how crisp those light rays are as in bright warm light the iPhone balances are creepy gait almost exactly where I'd want to see it a white gate lit by an ugly yellow security lamp Apple nailed it here our walkway shot shows the iPhone perfectly separating the color of these two lamps and also delivering a darker exposure which is well in keeping with the feel of this walkway at night and a flower in almost no light an iPhone 6s would have failed to focus here but the iPhone 7 had few issues locking onto this subject it was slow but the phone only had to rack focus once before finding this flower of course on a shot like this you'd probably just want to throw your flash and both iPhones now have quad LED flashes the iPhone continues to deliver great color accuracy from these color tone LEDs but having four light sources the iPhone 7 seems to be more prone to blowing out highlights in your shots than phones packing fewer lumens now moving to video the iPhone captures a very similar UHD file averaging around a 45 megabit per second bitrate a high enough quality to eat up 350 to 400 megabytes per minute of video another reason why we're happy to see the 16 gigabyte model finally die video output is very similar to photo output in terms of color and exposure even down to the graininess we see in uniform sections of blue sky again far less blocky than a lot of competitors but still just a bit busier than we'd prefer for the seven-plus zooming while shooting video shows a pretty clean handoff between the two sensors though very rarely the phone will pop exposure and shifting between these two cameras it's really good looking video though even with the larger aperture low-light videos will often look a little flatter or dull then still photos shot in the same location the graininess is very similar to what we might see on a Galaxy s7 but we'd actually kind of like to see Apple hit videos like this with just a touch more contrast and in video we can get a better look at image stabilization and it's buttery smooth Apple has been delivering well here for years and the iPhone 7 nicely balances natural movement against reducing handshakes where this stops though is on the 7 plus zoom increasing the focal length means every single hand movement is magnified and the phone just isn't capable of raining that back in and unchanged from previous iPhones the audio capture is sadly still mono no stereo sound for you human with two ears it's generally fine but far from top-tier most scenes sound dull there's no spatial information and while the wind and noise reduction filters do their job well often this produces a flat sound with a little noise reduction warbling in scenes with consistent noise floors the iPhone would not be our top pick for recording live music the iPhone 7 performed so close to the 6s we were surprised to see noticeably poorer performance in our exposure tests moving from dark to bright and back big jumps twitchy shimmery / Corrections and aggressive white balance adjustments this isn't very pleasant and we don't see the pretty blooming effect which last year's iPhone produced in adjusting exposure and it does wouldn't be an iPhone review without looking at some slow-motion video capturing 240 frames per second at 720p or 120 frames per second at 1080 this is a great way to play with time very few phones can match what Apple delivers here so let's wrap this up where's this leave us with the cameras on the iPhone 7 + 7 + these shooters are very good we're not really surprised there these iPhones will be two of the most popular phones of the year so these cameras will be two of the most popular new cameras used worldwide improvements to the focusing system and increasing the aperture are certainly welcome but we can't shake the feeling that the core photography experience hasn't moved much from last year's iPhone 6s the sensor size for example is now smaller than most of the $400 phones we've reviewed audio capture is falling further behind the competition the new fun zoom feature is only available on the larger phone and we see a few small gaps in Apple's usually bulletproof color and white balance which will hopefully be addressed in future software updates Apple has the basics covered but people who really want to drive this camera will need to rely on third-party apps and results might still fall behind what you can achieve out of the box with an LG or Samsung now iPhone fans coming from a6 or older will be very pleased with what's new here and for 650 and 700 and $69 phones thankfully folks springing for base-model iPhones will finally have the storage to really use these shooters pocket now psiphon coverage is brought to you by deeper and check out D brand comm to customize your iPhone with a real-time preview D brand skins are designed to add grip texture and kill those jet-black iPhone fingerprints they ship worldwide and iPhone skins start at under ten bucks if you're interested links are in the description below as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full iPhone 7 coverage and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review you