iPhone 11 Pro review : it s iPhone time. Apple released three new iPhones all at once this year. The iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Now, I honestly think the iPhone 11 is the phone most people in the iOS ecosystem should get if they re upgrading. So we ve got a whole other review of that phone that you should check out, too. But this, this is the Pro review.
The big difference from the XS comes on the back where Apple says the rear glass is now stronger and it comes in this frosted matte finish. It also integrates a glossy camera bump with three cameras. The whole back and the bump is a single piece of glass that’s milled out. The iPhone 11 is the reverse. It has a glossy back and the camera bump is matte. Now you know. I got a lot of questions about this matte finish and I think it s really nice, especially in this new midnight green color. It didn’t really pick up any finger prints, but it does seem a tiny bit more slippery than the gloss back of the previous phones and the iPhone 11.
But I also think most people are just going to stick this thing in a case, so it doesn’t seem like a huge issue. A lot of people also asked me if this matte finish will scratch easily, similar to the back of the Pixel 3,and so far the answer seems to be no. But we are going to have to keep an eye on it over time. Apple s finally relented and include 18W USB-C fast charger with the Pro phones. So you get a USB-C to Lightning cable as well. Now Apple s USB-C charger is not the small estor prettiest charger out there.
But anything is better than the slow 5W brickit’s been including for years, so I ll take it. So let s get into these cameras. Apple has a lot at stake here. Google and Samsung s cameras have been out performing the iPhone for a couple of years now. And Chinese phone makers, in particular, have been racing each other to add an endless array of photography features. If you re in the US, you re probably locked into iMessage and no camera is good enough to make you switch. But Apple doesn t have that advantage in big markets like Europe and China. Everyone uses WhatsApp and WeChat, and switching from iOS to Android is much easier. So Apple s added a bunch of features that first appeared on Android phones. There are three cameras on the iPhone 11 Pro.
The telephoto camera has the same basic sensor, but a faster f/2.O lens. The main camera has the same f/1.8 lens and a slightly better sensor. And there s the new super fun ultra-wide camera, which is basically twice as wide as the main lens and f/2.4.And the f/2.2 front camera is now 12 megapixels, up from seven, and has a wider 24mm focal length so it can pull out to a slightly wider angle in landscape for selfies. Apple s also updated its smart HDR processing system, which I was not very impressed with when I reviewed the iPhone XS and XR. The iPhone 11 cameras are an enormous improvement over the XS, and beat the Pixel and Galaxy Note 10 in most of our tests.
This shot of Verge video producer, Mariya Abdulkaf, outside in bright sun lights houldn’t be too hard for any camera to do a good job with .And all these photos look basically fine. But zoom and do 100 percent crop and the improvement from the iPhone X Sto the iPhone 11 main camera is stunning. The iPhone 11 is way sharper, with way more detail. I also think the iPhone 11 does a way better jobthan the Note 10 and it s a little better to my eye than the Pixel 3.This improvement is due to something Apple s calling semantic rendering. Basically, Smart HDR recognizes what s in the image and renders it appropriately. I asked Apple to break down how it works for me and it basically goes like this: First, the iPhone starts taking photos to a buffer the instant you open the camera app. So by the time you actually press the button, it s captured four underexposed frames and the photo you want. Then it grabs one overexposed frame.
This is all basically the same as the iPhone X S and the Pixel 3, except the Pixel doesn’t grab that overexposed frame. Second, Smart HDR and semantic rendering then start looking for things in the photos it understands. Faces, hair, the sky, things like that. Then it uses additional detail from the under and overexposed frames to selectively process the areas of the image it’s recognized. Hair gets sharpened, but the sky doesn’t. It just gets de-noised. Faces get re-lighted to make them look more even and the iPhone knows to sharpen up your facial hair. Smart HDR is also less aggressive in flattening the photos. Highlights and faces aren’t corrected as aggressively as before because those highlights make photos look more natural.
But other highlights and shadows are corrected to regain detail. Finally, the whole image is saved and you ve got a photo. This all happens instantly every time you take a photo, which is a testament to how powerful Apple s A13 processor really is. Here s that final image we just took. You can see how the iPhone 11 preserves more detail than the Pixel and Note in the shadows and highlights, and just blows the iPhone XS away in sharpness. The improvements to Smart HDR are applicable across cameras. Here s a quick comparison of the ultra-wides in the 11 Pro and the Note 10.The Note 10 did a better job exposing the sky, but the 11 is just a much sharper photo with more detail.
You can see the same thing with selfies. The XS Max has pulled up shadows so much that it looks a little hazy, while the iPhone 11 evenly pulls up shadows in Mariya’ s face, but preserves the contrast with the background. The Note 10 did all kinds of goofy skin smoothing and the Pixel 3 looks great,but it has less detail than the iPhone. Just look at her eyelashes. Now there are places where the iPhone 11didn t win in our tests.
The XS historically struggled with backlit subjects. And while the 11 is a definite improvement , this photo is really blue. And there s basically no detail in Mariya’s face. I think the Note actually did the best overall job here. And I think the Pixel does the best job in low light, but the iPhone isn’t bad. It s a lot better than the XS was last year.
Apple s promised a new mode for these situations called Deep Fusion, which is supposed to ship later this year, but I wasn’t able to test it. If it improves photos taken in this kind of light, then the iPhone will basically pull ahead in every situation. Apple also added a Night mode this year and it s really impressive. It preserves a ton more detail than the Pixel.
It comes on automatically in the dark and suggests an exposure time, which you can tweak or turn off if you want. The Pixel photo here looks more dramatic, but look a little closer. The iPhone has preserved all of the detail in the brick and graffiti, which is basically gone in the Pixel shot. Both of these Night mode photos look pretty similar, but look at all the extra detail in the bushes in the iPhone shot. Same with this shot. You d never know that fence was even there in the Pixel photo. I think the Pixel produces more dramatic-looking shots out of the camera, but I would rather have the extra detail from the iPhone.
All in all, I think the iPhone 11 camera does better in bright light than the Pixel 3 and Note 10,and the Night mode beats the Pixel 3more often than not. If this promised Deep Fusion update improves medium- to low-light performance as much as Apple says it will, the iPhone 11 will once again be the smart phone camera to beat. Apple s also made video on the iPhone 11 betterwith improved stabilization exposure and the ability to record 4K60 video from any of the three cameras.- But is it really that good? Let s put it to the test.
Alright, so we are going to head out in New York City and we are going to test against the Note 10,the Pixel 3, and the XS to see who does video best. We started out at the water and immediately you can see the color differences between the cameras. The Pixel leaned into the warm tones, while Samsung muddied the mid tones. And the iPhone XS leaned into the blues of the sky, while the 11 Pro balanced the warm and cool tones out the most. With the subject closer to the lens the Note 10 kept the flowers the sharpest, while the iPhone XS blurred the background the most. Okay, we ve got to test the audio on all these phones. I ll let you guys be the judge. Do I sound like the beautiful angel voice that I have, angelic voice? Of course, the answer is yes.
But on these phones, who s to say? In low light, Apple isn't afraid of underexposing the blacks, whereas Samsung and Google will bring them up.Now the 11 Pro does do a lot more smoothingto compensate for all of the noise this typically creates.The front-facing camera on the iPhone 11 Prodid a great job of balancing my skin tone and just the exposure in general. Even against this large neon light source.
But it wasn t as sharp as the Note 10. Now all these comparisons are great, but chances are you won t be recording on all of these phones side by side at the same exact time. So let s just talk about the iPhone 11 Pro. The front-facing camera now records in 4Kand the slofie is exactly how you d imagine it. You ll use it once and probably never touch it again. The video from the rear cameras, though, is really good. Like, in perfect light, it s honestly just impressive. Switching between lenses is pretty seamless in terms of color accuracy and exposure. And you can use the dial method or just tap the lenses on the screen to switch. Now you can t switch between lenses when you shoot in 4K60.So make sure you set 4K30 or lower if you are going to be doing that.
The ultra-wide angle lens looks super cool even with the crazy distortion. But there is no image stabilization, which shouldn't be a problem because naturally, the wider the lens, the less need for that. Both the telephoto and wide lens keep your shot stable and pretty sharp for a sensor their size. The color is punchy and pretty saturated and in perfect lighting, you, too, can have that shot on iPhone look. But in low light, even the iPhone 11 Pro, when viewed on a screen larger than its own,succumbs to noisy blacks and haloed highlights. My big issue, though, why do I have to leave the camera app to change the frame rates? It s not intuitive and it s just time-consuming.
Apple, just put it in the app. iPhones have always had great video, but the video on the 11 Prois the best I ve seen on a smartphone to date.And the gap is only getting bigger. Enough of me, back to Nilay.- The screen on the iPhone 11 Pro is a new OLED that Apple is calling the Super Retina XDR display. There s still a notch and Apple is still doing fancy, rounded corners and uniform bezels, which no one else in the industry has really managed to match.
Those bezels are still pretty big, though, especially compared to something like the Galaxy Note 10.This is the third year of the basic iPhone X design and Apple s competitors haven t been sitting still in trying to beat it. The big upgrades to the screen are around brightness and power efficiency. Basically, the screen can get a lot brighter than before and it also uses up to 15 percent less power, according to Apple. Now in typical situations, Apple says the iPhone 11 Pro displaycan go up to 800 nits of brightness and that when you re watching HDR content, the highlights will peak at 1,200 nits. In normal situations, I don t think you re going to notice it.I ve never had a problem looking at my iPhone XS display outside.
iPhone 11 Pro review
Like taking telephoto photos. Actually, I have no idea why Apple called these phones Pro. They re basically just nice updates to the iPhone XS, but I also think it s a waste of time to argue about names. iPhone 11 Pro Max is a bad name. But you know what, it s a great phone. And I think Apple might have done it. This is the best camera I ve ever seen on a phone. Let s get into it.(calming music) The iPhone 11 Pro looks almost exactly like the iPhone XS from the front. It s a little heavier and thicker, but unless you re comparing them directly, you probably won t notice. I certainly didn’t. You do get a much bigger battery in exchange for that extra size, which Apple says leads toa four-hour battery life increase on the regular Pro and a five-hour jump for the Pro Max. But it s surprisingly hard to check that number. I ll get into why in a minute.The big difference from the XS comes on the back where Apple says the rear glass is now stronger and it comes in this frosted matte finish. It also integrates a glossy camera bump with three cameras. The whole back and the bump is a single piece of glass that’s milled out. The iPhone 11 is the reverse. It has a glossy back and the camera bump is matte. Now you know. I got a lot of questions about this matte finish and I think it s really nice, especially in this new midnight green color. It didn’t really pick up any finger prints, but it does seem a tiny bit more slippery than the gloss back of the previous phones and the iPhone 11.
But I also think most people are just going to stick this thing in a case, so it doesn’t seem like a huge issue. A lot of people also asked me if this matte finish will scratch easily, similar to the back of the Pixel 3,and so far the answer seems to be no. But we are going to have to keep an eye on it over time. Apple s finally relented and include 18W USB-C fast charger with the Pro phones. So you get a USB-C to Lightning cable as well. Now Apple s USB-C charger is not the small estor prettiest charger out there.
But anything is better than the slow 5W brickit’s been including for years, so I ll take it. So let s get into these cameras. Apple has a lot at stake here. Google and Samsung s cameras have been out performing the iPhone for a couple of years now. And Chinese phone makers, in particular, have been racing each other to add an endless array of photography features. If you re in the US, you re probably locked into iMessage and no camera is good enough to make you switch. But Apple doesn t have that advantage in big markets like Europe and China. Everyone uses WhatsApp and WeChat, and switching from iOS to Android is much easier. So Apple s added a bunch of features that first appeared on Android phones. There are three cameras on the iPhone 11 Pro.
The telephoto camera has the same basic sensor, but a faster f/2.O lens. The main camera has the same f/1.8 lens and a slightly better sensor. And there s the new super fun ultra-wide camera, which is basically twice as wide as the main lens and f/2.4.And the f/2.2 front camera is now 12 megapixels, up from seven, and has a wider 24mm focal length so it can pull out to a slightly wider angle in landscape for selfies. Apple s also updated its smart HDR processing system, which I was not very impressed with when I reviewed the iPhone XS and XR. The iPhone 11 cameras are an enormous improvement over the XS, and beat the Pixel and Galaxy Note 10 in most of our tests.
This shot of Verge video producer, Mariya Abdulkaf, outside in bright sun lights houldn’t be too hard for any camera to do a good job with .And all these photos look basically fine. But zoom and do 100 percent crop and the improvement from the iPhone X Sto the iPhone 11 main camera is stunning. The iPhone 11 is way sharper, with way more detail. I also think the iPhone 11 does a way better jobthan the Note 10 and it s a little better to my eye than the Pixel 3.This improvement is due to something Apple s calling semantic rendering. Basically, Smart HDR recognizes what s in the image and renders it appropriately. I asked Apple to break down how it works for me and it basically goes like this: First, the iPhone starts taking photos to a buffer the instant you open the camera app. So by the time you actually press the button, it s captured four underexposed frames and the photo you want. Then it grabs one overexposed frame.
This is all basically the same as the iPhone X S and the Pixel 3, except the Pixel doesn’t grab that overexposed frame. Second, Smart HDR and semantic rendering then start looking for things in the photos it understands. Faces, hair, the sky, things like that. Then it uses additional detail from the under and overexposed frames to selectively process the areas of the image it’s recognized. Hair gets sharpened, but the sky doesn’t. It just gets de-noised. Faces get re-lighted to make them look more even and the iPhone knows to sharpen up your facial hair. Smart HDR is also less aggressive in flattening the photos. Highlights and faces aren’t corrected as aggressively as before because those highlights make photos look more natural.
But other highlights and shadows are corrected to regain detail. Finally, the whole image is saved and you ve got a photo. This all happens instantly every time you take a photo, which is a testament to how powerful Apple s A13 processor really is. Here s that final image we just took. You can see how the iPhone 11 preserves more detail than the Pixel and Note in the shadows and highlights, and just blows the iPhone XS away in sharpness. The improvements to Smart HDR are applicable across cameras. Here s a quick comparison of the ultra-wides in the 11 Pro and the Note 10.The Note 10 did a better job exposing the sky, but the 11 is just a much sharper photo with more detail.
You can see the same thing with selfies. The XS Max has pulled up shadows so much that it looks a little hazy, while the iPhone 11 evenly pulls up shadows in Mariya’ s face, but preserves the contrast with the background. The Note 10 did all kinds of goofy skin smoothing and the Pixel 3 looks great,but it has less detail than the iPhone. Just look at her eyelashes. Now there are places where the iPhone 11didn t win in our tests.
The XS historically struggled with backlit subjects. And while the 11 is a definite improvement , this photo is really blue. And there s basically no detail in Mariya’s face. I think the Note actually did the best overall job here. And I think the Pixel does the best job in low light, but the iPhone isn’t bad. It s a lot better than the XS was last year.
Apple s promised a new mode for these situations called Deep Fusion, which is supposed to ship later this year, but I wasn’t able to test it. If it improves photos taken in this kind of light, then the iPhone will basically pull ahead in every situation. Apple also added a Night mode this year and it s really impressive. It preserves a ton more detail than the Pixel.
It comes on automatically in the dark and suggests an exposure time, which you can tweak or turn off if you want. The Pixel photo here looks more dramatic, but look a little closer. The iPhone has preserved all of the detail in the brick and graffiti, which is basically gone in the Pixel shot. Both of these Night mode photos look pretty similar, but look at all the extra detail in the bushes in the iPhone shot. Same with this shot. You d never know that fence was even there in the Pixel photo. I think the Pixel produces more dramatic-looking shots out of the camera, but I would rather have the extra detail from the iPhone.
All in all, I think the iPhone 11 camera does better in bright light than the Pixel 3 and Note 10,and the Night mode beats the Pixel 3more often than not. If this promised Deep Fusion update improves medium- to low-light performance as much as Apple says it will, the iPhone 11 will once again be the smart phone camera to beat. Apple s also made video on the iPhone 11 betterwith improved stabilization exposure and the ability to record 4K60 video from any of the three cameras.- But is it really that good? Let s put it to the test.
Alright, so we are going to head out in New York City and we are going to test against the Note 10,the Pixel 3, and the XS to see who does video best. We started out at the water and immediately you can see the color differences between the cameras. The Pixel leaned into the warm tones, while Samsung muddied the mid tones. And the iPhone XS leaned into the blues of the sky, while the 11 Pro balanced the warm and cool tones out the most. With the subject closer to the lens the Note 10 kept the flowers the sharpest, while the iPhone XS blurred the background the most. Okay, we ve got to test the audio on all these phones. I ll let you guys be the judge. Do I sound like the beautiful angel voice that I have, angelic voice? Of course, the answer is yes.
But on these phones, who s to say? In low light, Apple isn't afraid of underexposing the blacks, whereas Samsung and Google will bring them up.Now the 11 Pro does do a lot more smoothingto compensate for all of the noise this typically creates.The front-facing camera on the iPhone 11 Prodid a great job of balancing my skin tone and just the exposure in general. Even against this large neon light source.
But it wasn t as sharp as the Note 10. Now all these comparisons are great, but chances are you won t be recording on all of these phones side by side at the same exact time. So let s just talk about the iPhone 11 Pro. The front-facing camera now records in 4Kand the slofie is exactly how you d imagine it. You ll use it once and probably never touch it again. The video from the rear cameras, though, is really good. Like, in perfect light, it s honestly just impressive. Switching between lenses is pretty seamless in terms of color accuracy and exposure. And you can use the dial method or just tap the lenses on the screen to switch. Now you can t switch between lenses when you shoot in 4K60.So make sure you set 4K30 or lower if you are going to be doing that.
The ultra-wide angle lens looks super cool even with the crazy distortion. But there is no image stabilization, which shouldn't be a problem because naturally, the wider the lens, the less need for that. Both the telephoto and wide lens keep your shot stable and pretty sharp for a sensor their size. The color is punchy and pretty saturated and in perfect lighting, you, too, can have that shot on iPhone look. But in low light, even the iPhone 11 Pro, when viewed on a screen larger than its own,succumbs to noisy blacks and haloed highlights. My big issue, though, why do I have to leave the camera app to change the frame rates? It s not intuitive and it s just time-consuming.
Apple, just put it in the app. iPhones have always had great video, but the video on the 11 Prois the best I ve seen on a smartphone to date.And the gap is only getting bigger. Enough of me, back to Nilay.- The screen on the iPhone 11 Pro is a new OLED that Apple is calling the Super Retina XDR display. There s still a notch and Apple is still doing fancy, rounded corners and uniform bezels, which no one else in the industry has really managed to match.
Those bezels are still pretty big, though, especially compared to something like the Galaxy Note 10.This is the third year of the basic iPhone X design and Apple s competitors haven t been sitting still in trying to beat it. The big upgrades to the screen are around brightness and power efficiency. Basically, the screen can get a lot brighter than before and it also uses up to 15 percent less power, according to Apple. Now in typical situations, Apple says the iPhone 11 Pro displaycan go up to 800 nits of brightness and that when you re watching HDR content, the highlights will peak at 1,200 nits. In normal situations, I don t think you re going to notice it.I ve never had a problem looking at my iPhone XS display outside.
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