Does the iPhone (or maybe any phone) have inherent zoom issues?

Chew Toy McCoy

Chew Toy McCoy

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I'm on an iPhone 11 Pro so they may have made great improvements in this area, but I've found on every iPhone I've had that as soon as you start zooming the quality degrades pretty quickly. Is this a major technology hurdle?
 
No, simple physics.

iPhones or any other fixed lens camera can't do optical zoom. So the only way to "zoom" is to spread the available pixels out, which degrades image quality.

The technology fix is simply increasing megapixels so even when "zoomed", our eyes can't distinguish the difference.
 
Here's something I can't wrap my head around, but you guys may have explained it. Let's say I take a picture of an insect from like 1.5' away. Then I take another picture from the same distance using slight digital zoom. The first picture is often much more defined when pinch zooming in on the photo. I understand using a large amount of digital zoom but I wouldn't expect that much difference with slight digital zoom. Older iPhone issue?
 
One aspect of optical zoom is perspective compression. It is obvious in movies, such as the 1970 Vanishing Point, where you see a car traveling toward the camera at 90mph but the camera is zoomed so it looks like it is barely moving; or Eric's Antioch Bridge picture, which makes the bridge look like more of a rise than it really is. Digital zoom is really not much different than cropping and cannot create this kind of effect without software modification.
 
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