Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro is expected to offer a significant camera advantage over the iPhone 15 Pro … [+]
This year’s iPhone 16 Pro is expected to become the first of Apple’s smaller smartphones to get a powerful 5x telephoto lens, just like this year’s larger iPhone 15 Pro Max. new report reveals much bigger camera upgrades coming to future iPhone flagships, starting with next year’s iPhone 17 lineup.
iPhone 16 Pro — Pro Max-level zoom camera
Fans of smaller iPhones aren’t currently getting Apple’s most powerful zoom, but that could all change when Apple brings its 5x tetraprism telephoto lens to the standard iPhone 16 Pro in September, according to respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. However, the same report details even more impressive zoom capabilities coming to future generations of iPhones, which Kuo has predicted will reach all the way to the iPhone 19 lineup in 2027.
Here, Kuo notes that the differences between the Pro and Pro Max cameras may re-emerge as new camera models are introduced, with the new tech potentially appearing first in the broader Pro Max lineup.
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro: Upgraded camera quality with significant zoom
Starting with the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple’s flagship is expected to feature a new 48-megapixel tetra prism camera with a larger 1/2.6-inch sensor, compared to 1/3.1-inch on the iPhone 16 Pro series. New, shorter-format prisms are also expected to be deployed to reduce the camera’s thickness.
That larger sensor size should give the camera a roughly 40% increase in light-gathering ability, reducing grain and improving low-light performance, while the upgrade from 12 to 48 megapixels will deliver a powerful boost in detail and digital zoom capabilities. A 48-megapixel sensor would also allow Apple to enable 8K video with 5x optical zoom, a feature already available on Samsung’s rival, the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
It’s not yet clear whether the new 48-megapixel tetraprism camera will appear in both iPhone 17 Pro models or just the larger iPhone 17 Pro Max, but Kuo expects the camera to appear on both the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max in 2026.
iPhone 19 Pro: new prisms and wider zoom range
Starting with the 2020 iPhone 19 Pro lineup, Kuo expects an even bigger improvement in camera performance thanks to increased optical zoom. The report speculates that increasing the optical zoom range could require a new, more complex prism geometry that reflects light more times internally. More complex optics can negatively impact quality through distortion and reduced light transmission, so Apple will need to mitigate these issues carefully.
Improving the long-range zoom performance would be a real challenge for Samsung, which recently reduced its maximum optical telephoto lens from 10x to 5x in the Galaxy S24 Ultra. According to Dxomark, the long-range zoom on this year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max already surpasses Samsung’s flagship product in low light situations.
That situation is currently reversed in brightly lit scenes, but if Apple were to take the opposite stance and go beyond 5x, we could see the iPhone take the lead in what was once one of Samsung’s strongest performance areas.
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