The word periscope was not used at any time during the Keynote in which the new iPhone 15 range was presented. But it is clear that it was floating in the air when the camera system of the new iPhone 15 Pro Max was presented.
Apple's most powerful and largest phone incorporates what on paper looks like the most advanced telephoto lens ever seen on a phone. Although it will have to be proven in practice, Apple seems to have once again given a lesson in innovation.
The technical characteristics may not tell us much. The telephoto camera allows 5X zoom with a brightness of f/2.8. What this means is that Apple has managed to combine a relatively wide range in one lens, the equivalent of a 120mm lens, with the best luminosity we have ever seen in a telephoto lens of this range on a phone. In fact, it is the same value as many professional telephoto lenses used in cameras. Something that doesn't seem like a coincidence.
All this means that we can take photos and videos of subjects at a certain distance or capture close-ups without requiring too much ambient light. And this is very important, since the luminosity of this telephoto lens exceeds that of its main adversaries.
Samung, for example, has incorporated an excellent 10x telephoto lens in its latest Galaxy S23 Ultra phones. The problem is that the brightness of that lens is limited to f/4.9. And this means that we cannot obtain good results if there is not much ambient light.
The Google Pixel 7 Pro also has a 5X zoom, but its brightness is somewhat lower (f/3.5). Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor or Huawei have also not achieved telephoto lenses of this range as bright as Apple's. To this we must add another element to the equation that seems important: the image stabilizer.
Apple uses a technology that promises. The new stabilizer not only moves the image sensor to compensate for the tremors of our hands, it moves the camera's own photographic module. You have to try it, but on paper it seems interesting.
The technology that Apple has used to equip a telephoto lens of this range is based on a system similar to that of submarine periscopes. The lens, instead of protruding from the camera module, is inserted inside and the light reaches it through four pentaprisms.
This is a major optical challenge. It must be taken into account that the first phone that dared to incorporate a camera with a zoom of this type was Asus, which has always stood out for taking risks with its mobile phones.
The first Asus Zenfone Zoom, launched in 2015, featured a 3X optical zoom with image stabilization. It was a lens with a variable focal length. Its luminosity ranged from f/2.4 to f/4.9. Clearly insufficient if we did not use it in broad daylight.
But the design of that objective, similar to that of a periscope like that of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, proved to be a success. Well, it is a technology that continues to evolve eight years later. In fact, Asus continues to innovate in the photography section of its phones.
The Asus Zenfone 10 innovates by incorporating an image stabilizer, with gimbal technology according to Asus, which seems similar to that of the new iPhone 15 Pro Max. We have been able to verify that this stabilizer is highly efficient when recording video. So we're very interested to see if the iPhone 15 Pro Max achieves something similar.
Do we really need a zoom like this on a phone? The truth is that many users demand it. Well, even if we continue using cameras to which we can attach any type of lens, the phone is definitely our first or second camera.
There are many photos and videos that we lose, or that have a disastrous quality due to the cult of digital zoom, not to mention a lens of this type. Let us remember that many of the most humble compact cameras have lenses with a zoom that exceeds that of the most advanced phones.
The iPhone camera is one of the things that is making more and more young people use an Apple phone. The competition with Android phones is tough in this regard, but Apple phones achieve something that the competition does not usually offer: balance and excellent image processing using very refined computational photography algorithms.
That and an ecosystem of audiovisual creation applications that far exceeds that of Android, is one of the advantages of having unified software and hardware. The price of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the only model that incorporates this telephoto lens due to its dimensions, starts at 1,469 euros with 256 GB of memory.
