iPhone 3x and 15x zoom on the 15-Pro series camera

Shot of my bird feeder from my deck.  Left:  3x zoom (no digital zoom)
Middle:  15x digital zoom from 3x camera.  Right - 100% crop from 15x

I recognize that smartphone cameras are becoming something of the norm when it comes to capturing images these days.  And as wonderful as they are for shooting scenes about the house or capturing business-related images, they do not have the capability to do extreme stuff well.

Take the example above.  I recently purchased an iPhone 15 Pro that comes with 3 cameras (0.5x, 1x, and 3x) and decided to photograph some birds in my back yard.  The 3x zoom is a mere 77mm relative, which in my books makes it equal to about a 1.5x zoom relative to a 50mm lens shooting a normal perspective.  You can, however, zoom in from there, and the phone boasts a seemingly impressive 15x magnification ability which relates to a 404 mm focal length on a full-frame camera body.

As you can tell though, the digital zoom capacity is not great at rendering details in the image.  The birds came out very pixelated and shooting in HEIF format does nothing to improve it.  I took the 3x image and expanded it in Photoshop manually and I think it is an improvement over the 15x digital zoom.  Given the fact that the sensor is 48 mp and the actual image is only 12 mp, the maximum zoom you should probably do is 2x (so 6x for the 3x camera).  Enlarging it from there in a good pixel editing program will likely yield better results.

The original 3x image magnified in Photoshop and cropped.

The bottom line is that, although your phone may be able to zoom significantly (the iPhone 16 pro boasts a 5x zoom with a 60x digital zoom), pushing the digital zoom to its extreme will not likely yield decent results.  You are better to zoom a bit and then enhance that image at home on your own.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com


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