Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test

Always worth to note:

DXOMARK sells test equipment and consulting services for (among others) camera tuning.

Naturally, they won't attack the image quality of a customer who purchased their test equipment and/or consulting service (usually not publicly known who did that), so they often tone down some of their statements when they review a device (and shift the attention to other areas).

Always interesting to check out the scores of DXOMARK competitors in parallel, e.g. VCX[0] which strives for an objective scoring scheme (but didn't test the device yet, indicating that they at least didn't have an early sample)

[0] https://vcx-forum.org/score/phonecam-2025

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...

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.

Comparing that 17 vs 18 photo id say it’s less a case of detail preserved and more heavy AI post processing.

That closeup zoom 18 eye shot has that classic AI smooth skin look AI influencers all have.

> "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"?

The caption on the close up says: “Details preserved on both face, face in the back in focus”. But it seems to me that a lot of detail is actually missing! On the later pictures you see a lot of skin “imperfections”, which looks much better. The 18 pro picture is way too smooth!

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.

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.

This is a question for the sake of curiousness; the article writer shot a couple of pictures of young black kids. I can't find any mention in the article, but is this just coincidence or is this commonly done becauses the darker skin is hard to shoot correctly?

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

All the Apple marketing sure does a heavy lifting, because even comparing with a 5+ years old iPhone camera, the new one isn't noticeably better. Take any 1" sensor proper camera and it's so, so much better than the iPhone's…

> 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?

I’m not a big fan of the bokeh on smartphone cameras. The depth of field isn’t shallow enough to really isolate the subject, yet it’s shallow enough to make background details slightly blurry. As someone who uses a DSLR, I don’t find the nisen bokeh particularly pleasing either. If I were using an iPhone 18 Pro, I’d probably keep it at around f4 for a deeper dof most of the time rather than shooting wide open.

I’m not convinced that this is a particularly scientific or rigorous test of the cameras! Seems rather lacking in control variables, documented processes, actual measurements etc.

The site is currently down (for me, at least):

https://web.archive.org/web/20260920202324/https://www.dxoma...

Zooming in on a clock 4-500yds away and expecting a fully crisp image seems somewhat of a useless benchmark.

it tells something that the word "aperture" is only mentioned 3 times in the test

My gripe with iPhone is hunting white balance. Always happening when I'm shooting video.

I wonder if newer phones / camera apps are better.

I’ll pass on the opinion of a website that has not only a cookie banner, but a stupid modal.

These photos are terrible. They have incredible quality, but they're still terrible.

The amount of post-processing in them makes them look fake, like somebody took a photo of the background, and then photoshopped the subject on top of it.

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.

Wait for cined's test. Here is the predecessor:

https://www.cined.com/lab-test-of-the-iphone-17-pro-rolling-...

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 really problem of iPhone camera is not these benchmark things. The problem is that the photo captured by the “Modern iPhone” simply does not look nice , let say, compared to iPhone 4S.

Vibe-reviewed.

So google got beat at its own game, I believe Pixel 11 was really a disappointment.

[dead]

Ok so let's hack it