Description

Replacement of the Front Camera of the iPhone XS

Change Front Camera iPhone XS

Camera Review

Flip to the front of the phone and Apple has tinkered under the bonnet with the front TrueDepth camera.

Speed is utterly of the essence here, with a new 7MP sensor that’s now ‘double the speed’ of its predecessor – this has been given a f/2.2 lens. Features that run alongside this include the dot projector and IR camera that Apple uses for Face ID and takes advantage of for a number of new photo processing upgrades.

All of this hardware is powered by the A12 Bionic chip, which – working with the phone’s image signal processor (ISP) – boasts some eye-opening features.

For a start, this power bump means the iPhone can make a trillion operations per photo (Apple’s boast, not something we counted in our tests. We’re diligent, but not to that level).

Boil this down and it means that red eye should be a thing of the past, something that never appeared in our tests, and it offers much greater control in post-production.

The camera on the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Mac is easy to use. Settings, surprising for a smartphone, are kept to a minimum which makes it fuss free to shooting images.

It’s easy to flip through the two ‘zoom’ levels by tapping the ‘1x’ icon that can be found on the screen. One of the big new features can be found in portrait mode – once you take a portrait shot, you can go to the phone gallery, tap edit and adjust the background blur with the slider.

Specs-wise, there is very little difference between the iPhone XS and iPhone X – the f-stops are the same, the optical zoom (2x) and digital zooms (10x) are the same, as is the dual optical image stabilisation.