Oh, I give the iPhone a ton of credit. It generally looks good enough, the HDR on video makes shit look better than reality, the low-light performance beats the absolute pants off of anything else I own by a _huge_ margin.
I bought an iPhone 12 Pro pretty much entirely as a camera to use to capture a bunch of photos of my kid because (1) I don't have my DSLR within arm's reach in the house all the time and (2) our house isn't very well lit. I have zero complaints about it. I probably take photos with my iPhone versus my actual photo gear at least 20:1, if not more.
The photos look great on a phone screen.
But even just printing a 4x6 photo from the iPhone and a 15 year old DSLR and putting them side by side, the difference is immediately obvious. The iPhone photos are disgustingly oversharpened while somehow being weirdly smoothed, but in all the wrong spots.
I grabbed a couple of my own photos taken on the same day in the same place under largely the same lighting conditions (it's never exact) and zoomed/cropped them to help demonstrate and for privacy. Neither have been adjusted at all (I did try and improve the iPhone photo best I could, but really managed no substantial looking improvement so posted it as-shot), so focus more on the definition in the hair: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
See if you can guess which came from an iPhone 12 Pro, and which came from a Nikon D70 (about a $100 camera body at this point).
That all said, the entire point was... expecting anything more than 12MP out of an iPhone is absolutely pointless because the sensor size and optics simply aren't there to actually produce a better photo.
>the difference is immediately obvious. The iPhone photos are disgustingly oversharpened while somehow being weirdly smoothed, but in all the wrong spots.
Not sure what is going on with your comparison crop. The phone photo seems to actually be out of focus in the relevant area, not to mention overexposed.
I bought an iPhone 12 Pro pretty much entirely as a camera to use to capture a bunch of photos of my kid because (1) I don't have my DSLR within arm's reach in the house all the time and (2) our house isn't very well lit. I have zero complaints about it. I probably take photos with my iPhone versus my actual photo gear at least 20:1, if not more.
The photos look great on a phone screen.
But even just printing a 4x6 photo from the iPhone and a 15 year old DSLR and putting them side by side, the difference is immediately obvious. The iPhone photos are disgustingly oversharpened while somehow being weirdly smoothed, but in all the wrong spots.
I grabbed a couple of my own photos taken on the same day in the same place under largely the same lighting conditions (it's never exact) and zoomed/cropped them to help demonstrate and for privacy. Neither have been adjusted at all (I did try and improve the iPhone photo best I could, but really managed no substantial looking improvement so posted it as-shot), so focus more on the definition in the hair: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
See if you can guess which came from an iPhone 12 Pro, and which came from a Nikon D70 (about a $100 camera body at this point).
That all said, the entire point was... expecting anything more than 12MP out of an iPhone is absolutely pointless because the sensor size and optics simply aren't there to actually produce a better photo.