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The trick is that it draws from classic design: much like the iPod evoked Braun radios, this is built like triple-lens film cameras such as the Crown8 E3. The thick ring around each lens on the iPhone leans into this heritage — it makes the camera look practical and important, rather than like Apple has failed to hide it as can be the case. I'm not sure it's necessarily better-looking than the central camera arrays on the Samsung S10 or Huawei Mate 30 , but I've become quite fond of its physicality.
The entire glass back of the phone now has an etched texture to it, which makes it more reliable to grip without a case. This is extremely welcome, because I learned exactly which surfaces in my home were flat and which weren't by watching the iPhone XS inevitably work its way towards edges and take a tumble. On the front, there's still a hefty notch that can't help but make the design look a little behind rivals with punch-holes or pop-up cameras, which give you the full screen to view.
Especially when other high-end phones are coming with super-futuristic in-screen fingerprint sensors that work great, which we ultimately prefer to face recognition.
That brings us to the screen, which is our first unqualified rave review for the 11 Pro. HDR videos, and especially Dolby Vision, look absolutely incredible. The wide P3 colour gamut makes photos look vibrant and realistic, and everything is pin-sharp. It's utterly, utterly gorgeous. The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max have the same screen density over ppi , but at different resolutions, so there's no difference in sharpness. For movie buffs, there's a strong argument to get the bigger model just to really, really enjoy the display. Apple has included new 'spatial audio' speakers, with Dolby Atmos support.
The effect is really impressive — there's clear separation of left and right, and you can hear nuance in the position of sounds from the front in movies, though you don't exactly get the full rear-speaker experience, unsurprisingly.
Of course, most people will probably use headphones for movies, but the new speaker setup has other advantages: it's super loud, and offers balance and quality that pretty much kills off the need for cheap Bluetooth speakers. It's even better and louder for calls — compared to the iPhone XS, the difference was noticeable from the very first ring tone we heard.
Okay, this is the big section. The iPhone 11 Pro is Apple's first rear triple-camera system, in a year that's been full of them. The third lens is another first for the iPhone: an ultra-wide lens. These again are now de rigeur for phones, having arrived on just about every high-end handset in the last 12 months. The ultra-wide lens brings a degree field of view, which is ideal for landscapes, getting crazy perspective shots, shooting tall or wide objects, or 'zooming out' on a shot when you can't walk backwards any further.
That's in addition to the standard wide-angle lens and 2x telephoto lenses that the device inherits from the iPhone XS this dual setup was also found on the iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7 Plus. These remain largely unchanged, with two small but impactful updates.
This is vital for the new Night mode option, which is exclusive to the 11 series of iPhones. Like similar options on other devices Google's Night Sight, Samsung's Bright Night, etc , this takes a slow shot in very dark conditions and pulls out colour and detail that would be totally lost normally. To accommodate all this, there's a new design of the Camera app that's exclusive to iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro.
The flashiest difference is that the live view of what's being shot isn't just limited to the main viewfinder — if you're using the wide-angle lens, a faint view of what the ultra-wide is seeing is displayed under the buttons, making it a bit easier to decide whether you want to change your zoom level. It's nice, though oddly doesn't always appear when you're in the 1x wide-angle lens.
At first, we suspected a bug, but it seems to be connected to focus distance: if you're shooting an object at fairly close range, you get a black interface. Pull back a little and the view from the ultra-wide fades in. Apple didn't return a request for clarification about exactly how this works before publication. Our favourite other difference is 'Quick Take' shooting, in which if you press and hold the shutter button, you'll capture video instead of pictures, which no change of modes needed.
And if you slide your thumb left, you'll lock into recording video, and don't need to hold any more. If you want to shoot bursts which is what used to happen when you held the shutter button , you slide right. It's a small change, but being able to rapidly switch between stills and video when your kid does something cute is so, so useful. A bunch of handy controls have been made more accessible just swipe over the different shooting modes to bring up a different set of buttons and there's a new icon for Night mode in the corner.
This shows whether Night mode is active it fires up automatically when needed , and how long you'll need to hold still for Night mode to work. The length of time will typically be one or three seconds if you're holding the iPhone in your hand: iOS calculates the time needed by looking at light levels and your hand shake. If you can go very still by leaning on something, it'll boost to five seconds.
Shoot the highest‑quality video in a smartphone — then edit with the same tools you iPhone 11 Pro lets you zoom from the Telephoto all the way out to the new Ultra mode uses intelligent software and A13 Bionic to deliver low‑light shots never With Apple Trade In, we'll find your phone a new home — the best form of. Shoot the highest‑quality video in a smartphone — then edit with the same tools you iPhone 11 Pro lets you zoom from the Telephoto all the way out to the new mode uses intelligent software and A13 Bionic to deliver low‑light shots never And you thought your photos couldn't get any better. Find a retailer near you.
When you press the trigger, a little timer counts down to when the shot is complete. You can actually manually override the timing if you're feeling confident, though — you can set it up to 30 seconds, in fact. You will need a tripod for this to be effective, but you can produce stunning starlight photography from this.
As we've hinted at above, the result of all this is astounding image quality, so let's look at some examples. First up, how the three lenses compare.
All shots from iPhone 11 Pro. Left to right: 2x telephoto; wide-angle; ultra-wide. See a larger version here. Here, we've chosen a subject that's not far away. Note that the telephoto preserves a good amount of detail in the shadow on the door's right-hand side. Apple's Smart HDR has had an upgrade this year too, with great results that we'll see more of soon. Without moving our feet at all, we go from the door filling the frame to taking up just a small portion in the centre.
The ultra-wide lens is 0. A few things to note here. First, the colour and light level matching between the three cameras is astoundingly similar.
Look at the lovely warm, nuanced sunny glow on the building's side, and how this translates from shot to shot. Getting this kind of light in the shots and keeping it consistent is one of the triumphs of the new camera system — we'll go more into that later. Apple says it put a lot of effort into calibrating the lenses to match, so you that you can switch between the zoom levels without worrying about white balance or contrast changing drastically.
This is not only great for lining up shots, but carries over to video too, where you can switch between lenses in the middle of recording without everything shifting in hue. You'll notice there's a fair amount of lens distortion clear towards the edges of the frame. This shot was especially hard on the camera for that, because elements near the edges are quite a bit closer than the subject in the middle. It's something that's unavoidable from a lens like this — Apple does some automatic correction, but in harder situations, you'll still get the effect. Top: iPhone XS Max.
Bottom: iPhone 11 Pro Night mode. This is an interesting comparison because you could, quite fairly, decide that you like the top photo more, because it's much closer to what the eye sees. It has an moody aesthetic value all of its own, and doesn't disgrace the outgoing iPhone XS' camera by any means.
Of course, the iPhone 11 Pro could take a nearly identical shot to that one if you simply turn off Night mode deliberately. Incidentally, Night mode only works on the wide-angle camera: if you try to use it in ultra-wide, it will turn on the flash instead. If you try to do it in telephoto, it just switches to the wide angle and uses digital zoom to mimic the telephoto, because the light capture is much better in that lens.
However, Night mode has given us not only a cool hyper-real light aesthetic of its own, but also just blows us away with everything it's picked up. What looks like a sea of black to the iPhone XS includes a sharp dramatic shadow from the fence. The church roof is summoned from nowhere.
Half a tree reappears over on the right! And here's the killer part about Apple's Night mode: it pulls out so much detail too. It's superior to Google's fabled mode for this, and it's one reason we're often happy to see it triggering for just a second even in situations that don't seem that dark: sometimes when it fires up, it barely lightens things, but it does produce so much more detail.
In the bigger version of the shot above, you'll see brickwork and sharper fence diamonds all get pulled in by Night mode.