Some iPhone 7 vs. iPhone 12 Comparison Photos

John Nack:

If anyone reads that New Yorker article and thinks they’ll prefer shooting on an iPhone 7, please show them these iPhone 7-vs-12 shots I took.

That’s a reference to Kyle Chayka’s “Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?” article, which I commented on yesterday. It’s coincidental that Nack’s year-ago series of comparison photos pitted the same two iPhones against each other that Chayka referenced. Chayka wrote:

In January, I traded my iPhone 7 for an iPhone 12 Pro, and I’ve been dismayed by the camera’s performance. On the 7, the slight roughness of the images I took seemed like a logical product of the camera’s limited capabilities. I didn’t mind imperfections like the “digital noise” that occurred when a subject was underlit or too far away, and I liked that any editing of photos was up to me. On the 12 Pro, by contrast, the digital manipulations are aggressive and unsolicited.

A lot of times when new iPhones are reviewed — including my own reviews — camera comparisons are made to iPhones from just one or two years prior, and differences can seem subtle. Separate iPhones by five years, though, and the results are striking. (It’s pretty easy to tell in Nack’s gallery which photos are from which iPhone, but if you want to be certain, click the “(i)” button in Google Photos.)

How do you take a photo like this or this — to pick two of my own recent photos taken with iPhone 13 Pro — with an iPhone 7? You can’t.

★ Wednesday, 23 March 2022