Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test

lluu about 17 hours ago 45 commentsRead Article on dxomark.com

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Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

velcrovan•37 minutes ago

Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.

Krasnol•29 minutes ago

Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?

matja•about 2 hours ago

I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.

Edit: e.g. the tree in one of the images in the page: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...

dofm•about 1 hour ago

That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down, judging by the EXIF.

Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture; bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.

I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.

As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.

robotmay•about 1 hour ago

Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.

gyomu•about 1 hour ago

> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"

Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?

opello•17 minutes ago

I was wondering about that too, it seems like it's partly in this test report:

https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AppleiPho...

and then more context, especially for the less objective categories, in this test protocol description:

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-camera-image-quality-test...

It was a little annoying to find (About Us > How We Test) but not awful I suppose.

azatom•about 16 hours ago

Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.

ricardobeat•about 1 hour ago

A little hard to interpret as the Huawei pictures are not cropped to the same frame. When zooming in the difference is less striking.

sharktheone•about 16 hours ago

Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.

But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago

microtonal•about 2 hours ago

It seems that in their ranking currently only the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is ahead?

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera

matwood•about 2 hours ago

> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago

Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?

torben-friis•about 1 hour ago

Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.

For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.

iririririr•about 16 hours ago

until the "denoiser" starts to hallucinate

LoganDark•about 2 hours ago

At least it doesn't detect moon shaped objects and impose a static image of the moon on top of it

Sharlin•about 1 hour ago

> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_...

Oh god that plasticization of the faces is absolutely horrifying. Like a bad image gen AI from 2022. Or reptilians wearing cheap rubber masks.

Edit: what's with the downvotes?

kccqzy•about 1 hour ago

Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.

sgt•about 1 hour ago

How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.

heaney-555•about 1 hour ago

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera

loloquwowndueo•about 1 hour ago

That’s harsh - the Aztek was not that bad …

onionisafruit•about 1 hour ago

Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.

sharktheone•about 16 hours ago

it tells something that the word "aperture" is only mentioned 3 times in the test

mathgeek•about 2 hours ago

What are you inferring from that? Interested to hear.

brzz•about 1 hour ago

I assume they're implying the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro is more of a marketing/spec sheet thing than an actual meaningful feature

miladyincontrol•about 1 hour ago

Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background. Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.

ThePhysicist•about 2 hours ago

The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.

kamranjon•about 2 hours ago

Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.

throwaway893257•about 1 hour ago

The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.