Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get both the quirks of the aperture blades. With a lens that is prone to bubble bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect.
I think that is what you're seeing here. Onion ring bokeh with contrast boosted by the blades (and an irregular shape because of them too)
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with Huawei where the details are visible.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from stone is pretty hard.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background.
Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.
Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?
I'm surprised that in no reviews of the iPhone 18 camera there is mention of the bad quality bokeh, it has heavy ring shapes that looks like what you'd get from a cheap catadioptric lens.
Edit: e.g. the tree in one of the images in the page: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...
That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.
Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.
As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.
> Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.
Why? Where can I read/learn more about this?
This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.
I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.
> This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe.
Also because of things like angle of incidence?
The purely round lens will generally have nice round (or at least cats-eye) bokeh across the frame with an edge that degrades softly as a result of aberration, so beams of light from different angles tend to blur into each other.
As soon as you get aperture blades, you lose that soft edge, get contrast but also a lot of competing shape influences at different angles. They will tend towards more rounded shapes as you stop down more.
And that is putting aside that some aperture shapes are just really insane when they are nearly wide open, right? (Konica 40mm f/1.8 AR I am looking at you with your shuriken bokeh)
Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh, it's the cause of polygonal stopped-down bokeh.
Heavily ringed bokeh just comes from the optics.
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get both the quirks of the aperture blades. With a lens that is prone to bubble bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect.
I think that is what you're seeing here. Onion ring bokeh with contrast boosted by the blades (and an irregular shape because of them too)
Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.
> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"
Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?
I was wondering about that too, it seems like it's partly in this test report:
https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AppleiPho...
and then more context, especially for the less objective categories, in this test protocol description:
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-camera-image-quality-test...
It was a little annoying to find (About Us > How We Test) but not awful I suppose.
Where is a comparing site where the exact same subject and lightening used? Why https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3 stopped it? I can only find these "trust me" reviews.
A little hard to interpret as the Huawei pictures are not cropped to the same frame. When zooming in the difference is less striking.
Interesting to see what they got out of basically the same camera sensor. It seems largely just like way better denoising capabilities. Maybe that is why they needed the extra NPU in the A20 chip.
But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
It seems that in their ranking currently only the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is ahead?
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago
Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?
Anecdotically, my current OPPO find x9 mops the floor with my previous iphone 16 pro in photography in practice. The 1-1 with apple only seems to be there for Google and Samsung, but the Chinese flagships are a step up.
For video I think the iphone hasn't been dethroned yet.
Wouldn’t that comparison be quite a bit closer vs the 17 Pro? I thought that was a decent camera upgrade year but I can’t keep track.
Generationally yes, the oppo is more recent, but (AFAIR, I'm speaking from memory) the 17 improved just on the selfie and accesory lenses, the main camera remained mostly untouched.
until the "denoiser" starts to hallucinate
At least it doesn't detect moon shaped objects and impose a static image of the moon on top of it
> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_...
Oh god that plasticization of the faces is absolutely horrifying. Like a bad image gen AI from 2022. Or reptilians wearing cheap rubber masks.
Edit: what's with the downvotes?
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
Look at one eye has lashes and the other doesn't! It's just a low-quality AI "denoise+sharpen" filter.
Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.
> what's with the downvotes?
Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with Huawei where the details are visible.
It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from stone is pretty hard.
How does it compare to the Samsung flagship phone cameras? I have to say I was impressed by the Samsung cameras, although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.
https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
That’s harsh - the Aztek was not that bad …
Like trading something flashy, fast and impractical for something ugly and practical (idk if Azteks were fast but I suspect not notably so). I don’t know if it works for the camera phone comparison.
I drove an Aztek once and it felt fast enough for regular city driving. Why anyone would _need_ a faster car is beyond me.
it tells something that the word "aperture" is only mentioned 3 times in the test
What are you inferring from that? Interested to hear.
I assume they're implying the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro is more of a marketing/spec sheet thing than an actual meaningful feature
Most users will never use it, or I should say adjust the aperture, most people appear to be more interested in the video performance, and the video performance depends upon having very good software and hardware combined as one which is where Apple is able to outdo the competition, with Apple Silicon/video software, Apple appears to only care about still pictures up to a certain point, over the last five or six years. In short video is king in today’s YouTube age.
What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?
I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".
DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?
Is it just me or in their initial photo the focus point is in a wildly different point. On the iphone it's prioritizing the foreground model, on the Huawei the background. Definitely noticeable based on hair, although the Huawei seems to oversharpen the face with iPhone doing a bit of the opposite.
The Huawei model just uses AI based upscaling and filtering which is why the images look so sharp when zoomed in, that's not depicting reality though... You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras and easily "resolve" details that are optically impossible to resolve with the camera lens as they are beyond the Abbe limit. At the very least they should compare RAW data in these posts, not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays.
This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?
Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).
Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.
Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.
> You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras
iPhone, Samsung, Chinese phones, they all do fake moons now.
The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.