Iphone 12 New features and Camera 7 new features iPhone 12 trailers 2020

Iphone 12 New features

Camera 7 new New features


The new iPhone 12 may well end up being delayed, but it's still expected to land this year – which means we've got some exciting new camera features to look forward to soon.

Can the iPhone 12 series possibly repeat the leaps made by the like of the iPhone 11 Pro? It's a tall order, given last year's iPhones were a big (and necessary) step forward for Apple's photographic smarts.

We got some improved Smart HDR, an excellent new Night Mode and more versatile camera hardware, including that new ultra-wide lens with its 120-degree field of view.

Yet, in many ways, the 'Pro' versions of the iPhone 11 fell a little short of delivering on their name, at least from a photographic perspective. And now the Huawei P40 Pro has nabbed the top spot from the iPhone 11 Pro in our best camera phone guide.

So what does the iPhone 12 need to regain the number one spot? The strongest rumors so far point to the addition of a LiDAR scanner, which is a depth-sensing system that Apple recently debuted on the iPad Pro 2020.

But that system is designed more for AR than photography, given that its resolution isn't high enough to help with Portrait mode. Which means we're more excited about Apple fulfilling our ever-growing wishlist of iPhone 12 camera features on – collectively, this lot would make it a far better photographic companion.

Here are the seven camera features we'd like to see in the iPhone 12 series.

New iPhone 12 release date, leaks, price, news and everything you need to know

(Image credit: Apple)

1. A brighter lens for the ultra-wide camera

The iPhone 11 brought an ultra-wide camera to Apple's smartphones for the first time, and it's a great new addition. In fact, its 13mm equivalent focal length is so wide, it almost needs an automatic 'finger removal' tool for the times you accidentally get your hand in shot.

But with a relatively slow f/2.4 lens and small 1/3.6in sensor, the ultra-wide is also the poor cousin of the iPhone 11 camera family. We'd like to see it get a brighter maximum aperture on the iPhone 12 – for example, the f/1.8 lens seen on the Huawei P40 Pro's ultra-wide – to help it perform better in low light situations. Or even get Night mode, which is currently reserved for the main Wide camera.  

2. An improved hybrid zoom system

The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max both have a Telephoto camera, which you don't get on the standard iPhone 11. But its 2x optical zoom falls a little short of the reach seen on rivals like the Huawei P40 Pro (5x optical zoom) and Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra (10x hybrid zoom), which is our current zoom champ.

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Smartphone cameras use various techniques to boost their zoom. The Galaxy S20 Ultra, for example, uses a folded periscope lens to reach 4x optical zoom, followed by a combination of cropping and pixel binning to reach 'lossless' 10x hybrid zoom. 

From the latest rumors, it looks unlikely that the iPhone 12 will have a periscope lens. But we'd like to see its Telephoto camera include an equivalent of the 'Super Res Zoom' system seen on the Google Pixel 4. This boosts detail and reduces noise for the useful levels of zoom (3x, 5x, and 10x) that are beyond its 52mm focal length.

3. Some genuinely 'Pro' features in the camera app

Apple tends to treat its default Camera app as a point-and-shoot camera experience, leaving more professional manual controls to third-party apps. But we think there are a few features that could make a big difference, without cluttering its interface.

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The main one is an option for 'Raw' shooting. This is available in apps like Halide, but we'd love to be able to shoot 'Raw + HEIC' in the Camera app, giving us the option of making our own tweaks when Smart HDR goes overboard on the sharpening algorithms. It'd also be great to see the ultra-wide camera support Raw shooting.

Elsewhere, we'd like a built-in spirit level to help you see when your shot is level, which would be particularly handy for the ultra-wide camera. And a long exposure mode, one that uses computational trickery like the Spectre Camera app, would be a great addition to its main shooting modes.

4. A video Portrait mode (that actually works)

Smartphone cameras are now capable of some impressive bokeh simulation for stills, but video is another challenge entirely. Samsung has attempted it recently with its 'Live focus video' mode on phones like the Galaxy Note 10 Plus, but right now it's an inconsistent gimmick.

(Image credit: Samsung)

That's because simulated background blur is much harder to achieve for video than stills. Objects very close to the camera will have some natural shallow depth of field, but beyond that your phone needs to apply a mask to the subject and apply blur to each frame even as you move around.

It's certainly a big technical challenge, but perhaps an iPhone 12 LiDAR scanner could supply some additional information to help here, even if i