Improve Your IPhone’s Digital Zoom With This App
Any iPhone can take a great photo. However, if you want to scale up, you need to upgrade to Pro. Starting with the iPhone 7 Plus, Apple reserved the telephoto zoom lens for its more expensive devices. His “standard” iPhones have to use digital zoom to get closer to the subject, resulting in reduced image quality. At least when you use your iPhone as intended by Apple.
I’ve talked about this issue before , but just to remind you, here’s the full list of iPhones with a telephoto lens:
- iPhone 7/7 Plus (2x zoom)
- iPhone 8/8 Plus (2x zoom)
- iPhone X (2x zoom)
- iPhone XS/XS Max (2x zoom)
- iPhone 11 Pro/11 Pro Max (2x zoom)
- iPhone 12 Pro/12 Pro Max (2.5x zoom)
- iPhone 13 Pro/13 Pro Max (3x zoom)
- iPhone 14 Pro/14 Pro Max (3x zoom)
These iPhones have a second or third camera dedicated to optical zoom. All the rest are not. For example, when you “zoom” on the iPhone 14, you’re really just digitally zooming in—cropping the image to make the subject appear closer. But here’s the catch: Sometimes, even when you decide to use the zoom camera on the iPhone Pro, iOS still decides to use the digital zoom. If the system thinks the lighting isn’t good enough for a telephoto lens, for example, it will simply crop the main lens. This is also the process used for 2x zoom on the 13 Pro and 14 Pro Max, but since the sensor is large enough, this usually results in a decent quality digital zoom.
Digital zoom is not bad by definition. It’s a bit sly on Apple’s part to say you’re “zooming” when you really aren’t (in fact, all iPhone camera lenses are fixed at their respective focal lengths, so you can’t mechanically “zoom” at all), but digital zoom has own place. With ever-evolving technology, smartphones can take advantage of digital zoom and fill in gaps by adding detail that hardware alone can’t capture.
This is the type of digital processing that allows some smartphones to take wild zoom shots. For example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra can use “super-resolution zoom” up to 100x. (For context, my 14 Pro Max has a 15x zoom.) The S23 Ultra’s 200-megapixel camera certainly does it, but it’s the combination of hardware and software that makes such a feat possible.
Halide can make digital zoom great on any iPhone
While Apple doesn’t have the best digital zoom built into iOS, you can improve the zoom without their help. Halide, a professional camera app, recently introduced “Neural Telephoto”, a feature that uses machine learning to improve digital zoom on an iPhone without a telephoto lens, giving 1x zoom users access to high-quality 2x zoom. It’s the same technology as the company’s macro mode, which uses AI to capture close-ups with enhanced detail.
This feature is not only handy for those who don’t have a Pro iPhone, but also for those with a defective telephoto lens, such as the one on my previous iPhone , which forced me to select digital zoom if I wanted to get closer. With Halide, at least my digital zoom would be better.
By default, the application creates two versions of the image for you: a JPEG with enhanced digital zoom, and a full RAW file without digital zoom. You can fiddle with the settings, but this default mode ensures that you always have access to the full 1x image when you want to try digital zoom.
I would like to see this technology go even further in Halide. Why not more than 2x the improved digital zoom, especially for professional iPhones? The 14 Pro’s 48MP sensor isn’t quite as big as the S23 Ultra’s 200MP sensor, but what if we could make that 15x digital zoom even better?
Halide, like many professional camera apps, has moved to a subscription-based pricing model. If you bought the app in the past, you still have access to it for free. For new users, you have a choice between $2.99 per month, $11.99 per year, or $59.99 for life. There’s a seven-day free trial for an annual subscription, so you can try it out for a week to see if digital zoom and all the other benefits are worth it.