Camera Comparison: iPhone 7 Plus vs. iPhone 6s Plus
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First day out in the wild with my iPhone 7 Plus, replacing my iPhone 6s Plus. Here are my first impressions. The hardware specs are covered all over the internet, so no need to repeat those details here. The phone is faster because the hardware is better, there are higher storage options (which are great, that 4K video is like 1GB/minute), and it doesn’t have a headphone jack (the whining about this will seem silly really soon).
I’m passionate about photo quality and I haven’t seen much more than the hardware specs covered so far, so here’s a side by side comparison between the 7 Plus and the 6S Plus. I took photos of the same subject at the same time. The left picture is the 6s, right is the 7.
The 7 Plus looks a little better.
As for the second lens, at this point the benefit of a secondary lens with larger focal length is that you can do a 2x zoom with optics rather than software. This is very useful. Software zoom is the really just cropping the photo and enlarging it. This second lens gives the 7 Plus a proper zoom.
We’ll see what interesting things they figure out how to do with the two lenses engaged simultaneously. However, reports of this being a legitimate replacement for a proper camera are exaggerated. This, like every iPhone upgrade since the beginning, is an incremental step forward. The quality keeps getting better, to the point that if you go back more than a couple of iPhone generations the pictures look ridiculous.
But as the folks at ATP noted in the last few episodes, the iPhone camera components are <$50 so between that and the laws of physics it will be hard to replicate what you can get out of a proper large camera.
