The iPhone 14 Pro is expected to make a big break with Apple tradition, and we’re not just talking about its disappearing notch: the flagship’s main camera has also been tipped to finally make the leap from a 12MP to 48MP resolution.
Is that a big deal? After all, the Nokia 808 PureView arrived back in 2012 with a 41MP sensor – not to mention the countless Android phones from Huawei, Xiaomi and Samsung that have arrived with high-megapixel cameras in the past few years.
But for Apple fans, it’d be a momentous change for two reasons. Firstly, iPhones have been built around 12MP sensors since the iPhone 6S back in 2015. This means the iPhone 14 is expected to deliver the first major megapixel bump for seven years, and the most dramatic one in the history of the iPhone.
But it’s also important because of the timing. We currently rate the iPhone 13 Pro as the best camera phone you can buy, and during a time when a phone’s photographic skills have never been more important. So why might Apple now risk making such a dramatic change to its flagship phone camera?
There are a few likely explanations – and, interestingly, very few have to do with photography. The bump to 48MP would reflect the trends we’ve seen recently in mirrorless cameras, which increasingly walk a tightrope of balancing traditional photographic demands with exciting new possibilities in image making.
The timing certainly makes sense – now it’s just a question of what Apple plans to do with those extra pixels…
Trust the process
In the past, combining small sensors with high megapixel counts was about as advisable as using FaceApp on your dog. In other words, a pretty bad idea, because more megapixels means smaller pixels, and smaller pixels means weaker image signals with more overall noise. That noise would likely obscure any extra detail you gained from the higher resolution, so lower megapixel sensors were the sensible choice.
This is fundamentally why the iPhone has stuck with a 12MP camera sensor for so long. It’s increasingly looked like a photographic dinosaur in the process, particularly when you compare it to the 108MP Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and 50MP Google Pixel 6 Pro. But the logic has been, and continues to be, pretty sound – as long as you’re looking at it through the lens of taking photos for the web.
So what’s changed to make Apple reconsider? Firstly, there have been the processing advances made for high-megapixel sensors. ‘Pixel-binning’ , which treats four adjacent pixels on a sensor as one big pixel, has become so sophisticated that even full-frame cameras like the Leica M11 now adopt it. In the M11’s case, it gives you the option of taking 60MP, 36MP or 18MP photos.
