This fall, Apple will debut the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. While camera upgrades have almost always been the star of the show when it comes to iPhone Pro models, this year in particular is a bit special. We’ll be delving into everything currently rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro camera, and what that’ll mean for your photos.
First and foremost, the iPhone 17 Pro will likely adopt a camera-bar style design, though it’ll still follow the same triangular triple camera array that we’ve seen since iPhone 11 Pro. With this new design, the microphone, LiDAR module, and flash will be moved over to the right side – potentially opening up room for larger sensors.
We’ve all seen this design for many months now, and we even recently saw an Apple employee testing one in public with a discrete case. That said, many have wondered – will this year’s camera upgrades justify the much larger camera bump?
New Telephoto lens
This year, we’re likely to see a new 48MP Telephoto lens, allowing for higher quality crisper shots from that zoom lens. It also means that Apple might introduce their optical crop feature first seen on iPhone 14 Pro – where the phone will crop in on the middle 12MP of the photo and produce an ‘optical’ shot.
In this case, if we hypothetically had a 5x 48MP telephoto, the iPhone would be able to capture 10x shots in 12MP.
However, the current rumor isn’t that we’ll have a 5x telephoto – but instead an 8x telephoto. This rumor is a bit sketchy, but it’s worth mentioning. That source also claimed that there’d be a second Camera Control button on the top of the phone, though that’s incredibly unlikely at this stage in the cycle. We would’ve seen some form of proof prior.
Nonetheless, with the Telephoto lens taking the leap to 48MP, that means all three lenses on the iPhone will be matching in resolution. Last year, iPhone 16 Pro introduced a 48MP Ultra Wide lens.
Better front-facing camera
Outside of the telephoto lens, the front-facing camera is also going to see a large upgrade this year. It should be jumping from a 12MP sensor to a 24MP sensor, allowing for crisper selfies – as well as sharper videos for social media platforms such as TikTok.
Camera app upgrades
According to a MacRumors source, Apple is working on a new pro camera app for iPhone 17 Pro users – for both photo and video. It isn’t quite clear what that’ll mean, though the source mentioned that it’ll potentially rival other apps like Halide, Kino, and Filmic Pro.
Beyond that, we’ve also heard from other sources that Apple is working on multi-cam video recording for iPhone 17 Pro. 8K video recording is also potentially in the pipeline.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has also mentioned that Apple would like for iPhone 17 Pro to be the best option for vloggers and content creators. From the sounds of it, video will be a big focus for iPhone 17 Pro.
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