Read our Product Environmental Reports for detailed information on the environmental performance of every Apple product. Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes U, Clips, and Apple Store app are preinstalled. But is it really worth upgrading from your current device? Compared to the iPhone 8 Plus, the iPhone XR offers up to 1.5 hours more battery life each day. The new Smart HDR feature is also available in the Camera app of the iPhone XR.
Android doesn’t have full screen built into the OS so video apps like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, STARZ, Encore, and EPIC are all tiny on the Note 9…those apps are all full screen on the iPhone. You probably wouldn’t want to upgrade to the iPhone XR from these phones, as you’ll lose your telephoto lens. But if you shoot a lot in Portrait mode, the Depth Control feature definitely makes it worth upgrading to the iPhone XS or XS Max. So you canshoot self-portraits with beautifully blurred backgrounds and different lighting effects. The advanced Depth Control feature lets you adjust the depth of field after you’ve taken a photo. The iPhone XR camera has a single rear-facing wide angle lens.
Flash performance isn’t one of the new iPhone’s strong points. Target exposure for our studio test scene is very low, resulting in severely underexposed subjects. When zooming into the image, we can also see some color quantization on the skin tones of the subject’s face and a quite noticeable red-eye effect. The observations about the real-life test scenes above are confirmed by our testing and measurements in the DxOMark lab.
Unlike the Xs Max, the XR only does portrait mode from its sole wide camera. The iPhone XR has the same processors, but it has only one lens/one camera as its main camera, not the dual wide/telephoto system of the Xs and Xs Max. The iPhone has more patents, more smarts, more secret sauce and more processing power than any DSLR, camcorder or mirrorless camera. Apple doesn’t go talking about the secret technology inside and expects us just to look at the pictures it makes. Take a look and you’ll be very pleased; Apple puts more magic picture-optimizing technology in the iPhone than we can get in any other camera.
We also observed some aliasing and moiré patterns in bright light, but just like with flare, you’d have to look closely to spot any of those imperfections. The improvement in dynamic range is even more obvious in the backlit portrait scene below. The iPhone XS Max captures noticeably better highlight detail in the bright background than last year’s iPhone X. The current leader in the DxOMark ranking, the Huawei P20 Pro, captures a similarly wide dynamic range.
Opportunities for improvement include underexposure in flash images, and quite noticeable luminance noise in lower light and in the shadow areas of high-contrast images. The Apple iPhone XS Max delivers excellent image quality in most light conditions. This free Apple infrastructure moves full-bandwidth pictures and sound all over the house, all controlled anyway I find it most convenient. Other things like website bookmarks and notes and email and everything else also all appear on all my computers and mobile devices.
Access the best of Getty Images and iStock with our simple subscription plan. Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options await you. I probably won’t buy one because of the price, but it’s a nice ride. IPhone XS Max has a 6.5-inch screen in an iPhone Plus-sized body, with all of the same exact features of the iPhone XS. Occasionally some lens flare is visible in iPhone XS Max images.
But perhaps you’re still not sure which iPhone is best for you. And the iPhone XS models have four microphones, allowing you to record stereo sound. Since the Home button has been removed to make way for the edge-to-edge cast of the movie replacements screens, Face ID now replaces Touch ID. All three iPhones have a 7-megapixel TrueDepth front-facing camera. You can use Portrait mode with the front-facing camera to create a shallow depth field.