The iPhone XS's camera is great, but it lacks a few features that might significantly improve the lives of photography enthusiasts. If you're one of these folks, you have my permission to buy the iPhone 11, but you still may really want the 11 Pro, because it has three cameras instead of two. It just depends on how important zoom is to you.
Let's break down the setups. Both the iPhone 11 and XS have a dual-camera system including a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens. Their second shooters differ: The XS has a 12-megapixel telephoto lens, while the 11 has a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens with a 120-degree field of view.
An ultra-wide lens is best for taking, well, ultra-wide shots without distortion (as opposed to the curves you'll see from a fisheye lens). A telephoto lens, which specializes in zooming, is preferable for portraits or landscape photos with an isolated subject.
For serious smartphone photographers, the ultra-wide lens is probably the more valuable feature; if you want top-quality phone shots, you should be avoiding the zoom feature beyond the 2x mark. If you want zoom and you have an iPhone XS, you'll have to get the iPhone 11 Pro with its three-camera array.
Here are the rest of the iPhone 11's new camera features:
- An improved Smart HDR system that can differentiate between faces and their surroundings, and process shades and shadows accordingly
- A night mode that produces excellent low-light shots (it's what the Pixel 3 has, but better)
- A Deep Fusion feature to better capture details and reduce noise (coming later this fall)
- 4K60 video support for all three cameras (and you can switch between the wide and ultra-wide lenses if you're recording in less than 60 frames per second)
Finally, the iPhone 11 has a better front shooter (12 megapixels, to the iPhone XS's 7 megapixels), with the ability to take slow-motion selfie video. But if you buy a new phone just to take "slofies," I'm judging you hard.
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