Why New Smartphone Cameras Feel Worse
In a Nutshell
Smartphone camera improvements have plateaued for everyday daylight photos, with recent models like iPhone 17 and Galaxy S26 looking similar to older ones (e.g., iPhone 11, S23) but often overprocessed—showing unnatural haloing, glowing, and flatness from aggressive multiframe HDR, tone mapping, and face detection. Manufacturers now prioritize edge cases like low light and zoom, where computational photography shines, but this overapplies effects to normal scenes, creating a less natural look. Use apps to dial down processing for better results, and check generational comparisons in linked shorts.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Broke out every iPhone generation from 1 to 17 and took the same picture with each back-to-back. Results surprising: latest generation not always far and away the best. Tested with different phones in different scenarios.
For years, smartphone cameras focused on improving regular photos because they started bad. First iPhone camera was 2-megapixel pinhole with no autofocus, no video, no selfie camera. As culture valued quick high-quality pictures and videos, cameras improved drastically year-over-year, becoming a legitimate selling point.
Around 2010s, phones stopped getting way bigger due to pocket size limits (physics). Camera bumps grew, but dramatic improvements lessened. Example: iPhone 17 photo vs iPhone 11 photo look pretty similar without zooming—slight contrast and saturation differences. iPhone 17 has larger sensor (more background blur), iPhone 11 more in focus. For most people, both fine. Any phone from past 5 years takes perfectly usable photo in broad daylight ideal conditions.
Now focus on difficult scenarios: low light, fast-moving subjects, deep zoom. Real separation between good and bad cameras in worst conditions.
Example: Backlit scene with Pixel 10 using computational photography, multiframe HDR, tone mapping, exposure adjustment, face detection to show face, black hoodie, blue sky in one shot. Comparison: Nexus 4 (pre-smart HDR) shows how terrible the raw scene is.
Sign in to read the full notes
Get access to AI-generated notes, topic timestamps, and more.