The iPhone 7 Plus Has Unlocked Every Camera Feature. How Good Are Those Two Lenses?

It doesn't work quite the way Apple says it does.

The camera is this generation of iPhone's biggest selling point, and it ate up more stage time than anything else in the iPhone section of Apple's launch event.

This week Apple switched on Portrait mode — the depth-of-field effect that blurs the background — in the iOS 10.1 beta. Every camera feature on the iPhone 7 Plus is now "unlocked."

QDaily spent a few days shooting with the dual-camera iPhone 7 Plus. By comparing it against other phones, we tried to work out what is actually different about what Apple calls "the best smartphone camera."

We picked the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6s Plus and the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge to shoot against. Here is roughly what their main cameras are made of:

The iPhone 7 Plus adds a wider aperture and a second lens for optical zoom. Apple also designed its own image-processing chip for the first time, using machine learning to enhance photos automatically.

One caveat: the official sample shots you normally see rest on an endless pile of helping tricks. We tried to shoot the way people actually shoot — most photos handheld, with no careful lighting.

If you want a professional's verdict — what the iPhone 7 Plus can do once you have trained yourself to shoot at a high level — we recommend travel photographer Austin Mann's report from Rwanda, and the sample photos an ESPN sports photographer shot.

One last note: the images on this page are compressed. If you want the originals we shot, you can view and download them here.

The two lenses don't work the way Apple said on stage

At the launch, Apple said the iPhone 7 Plus has one main lens and one secondary lens. A new "1X" button sits in the middle of the camera interface; by default the 28mm prime lens takes the picture. Tap the number and it becomes "2X," which activates the 58mm optical-zoom lens and pulls the image closer. The two lenses work independently.

The truth is messier. We ran a test by covering one lens at a time, and found that when you shoot scenery at a moderate distance, the iPhone does behave the way Apple described.

But in dim light, and in macro shooting — specifically, when the lens is within 20 centimeters of the subject — the secondary camera never kicks in at all. However far you zoom in at those moments, it is all digital zoom.

And when the optical-zoom lens is doing the work, covering the main lens makes the whole frame blow out into uncontrolled brightness. So the main lens appears to handle the light metering: the two lenses do work together after all.

Between 1x and 2x it is still digital zoom. The iPhone 7 Plus uses the main lens there, and covering the secondary lens changes nothing.

Optical zoom makes distant subjects sharper

Because of that second lens, the iPhone 7 Plus should in theory be better than other iPhones at shooting things far away. In practice, on a clear day, it is.

The iPhone 6 and 6s Plus zoom to 5x and the S7 Edge to 8x, while the iPhone 7 Plus goes to 10x. Think of it this way: with a second lens, the iPhone 7 Plus stacks digital zoom on top of 2x lossless optical zoom.

That means it starts from a higher baseline than the other phones when shooting at distance, so it holds more detail — windows on faraway buildings are clearly legible. Here it is well ahead of the other three.

From left to right: iPhone 6 at 1x, 2x and 5x zoom

From left to right: iPhone 6s Plus at 1x, 2x and 5x zoom

From left to right: S7 Edge at 1x, 2x and 8x zoom

From left to right: iPhone 7 Plus at 1x, 2x and 10x zoom

You have probably also noticed how different the colors are across this set. The iPhone 7 Plus comes closest to the scene as it looked, with more accurate white balance and exposure. The S7 Edge's colors, by comparison, are somewhat off.

In macro shots the gap mostly disappears, except in color — because here the iPhone 7 Plus does not use the secondary camera. There is no need for it: the main camera has the wider aperture and focuses better up close.

From left to right: macro shots at 2x zoom on the iPhone 6s Plus and the iPhone 7 Plus

A wider aperture shows up clearly at night

The main lens goes from f/2.2 to f/1.8, which means it gathers more light in less time and the picture comes out clearer.

Night is where a wide aperture earns its keep. Every shot below was taken handheld, metered on the CCTV Headquarters building in the distance. The iPhone 7 Plus is plainly "brighter" and holds more detail — even though its shutter speed here was shorter than the iPhone 6's and the iPhone 6s Plus's.

Zoom in, though, and it is not much sharper than the 6s Plus. That may come down to shooting handheld, even though both phones have optical image stabilization — a small motor inside the camera that moves to cancel out the shake in your hands.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

To take shake out of the equation, we shot two more sets at night on a tripod.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

On a tripod the iPhone 7 Plus's advantage in light-gathering widens. It picks up things the other two iPhones missed entirely — the outline of trees in the distance, for instance — and keeps noise down to a level you barely notice.

Its night colors are more sharply drawn and warmer. But as far as we could tell, the iPhone 6s Plus's photos come closer to what the eye actually sees.

The iPhone 7 Plus's approach is the one that flatters an ordinary viewer's eye; the photos have a pop to them. At least it does not overcorrect its colors the way the S7 Edge does — photographers have complained that Samsung's grading leaves them almost nothing to work with in post. Then again, the S7 Edge handles dark scenes a bit better than the iPhone 7 Plus. It has a wide aperture too, and look closely and its images hold more detail.

That gap widens in night scenes with messy, mixed light sources. The grain of a sculpture, the pebbles in a pool, a wall in the distance — the iPhone 7 Plus renders all of it better than the two iPhones before it, and about as well as the S7 Edge.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

The wider aperture changes depth of field as well: the iPhone 7 Plus blurs backgrounds more, which gives a picture more layers. The change is not dramatic, but compare the shots carefully and you can see it.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

The new image processor retouches photos by itself, and that changes their color

The sample photos Apple showed on stage had unusually rich color, and that has to do with the iPhone 7's new ISP, the image-processing chip. Apple says the chip runs 100 billion operations a second; with machine learning and Apple's own imaging algorithms, it says, the iPhone 7's photos get more accurate exposure and white balance, with color corrected at the same time.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

The algorithms widen the image's latitude — the range of brightness in a scene it can hold. The set above was shot into the light, metered near the bright area. You can see that the iPhone 7 Plus balances the bright and dark parts better than the other three phones; it is the clearest of the four. The S7 Edge holds more detail in the tree trunks and the background, but its glare is heavy.

Where the contrast is less extreme, the iPhone 6s Plus does perfectly well — as good as the iPhone 7 Plus, sometimes better. The clearest shadow detail belongs to the Samsung S7 Edge; the iPhone 7 Plus is the more accurate in the highlights.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

The algorithms change color, too. The iPhone 7 Plus pushes saturation and contrast harder, so its pictures look richer — next to the other two iPhones, they look as though someone has already edited them. The most saturated of all, though, is still the Samsung, which has always shot warm.

From left to right: iPhone 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Samsung S7 Edge

Portrait mode is fun, but it falls apart at night

Portrait mode is the other feature only the iPhone 7 Plus has. It is another algorithm-driven effect: it blurs the background the way a wide-aperture lens would. Plenty of people find that flattering, and it suits photographs of people.

Some Android phones and third-party apps already do something similar. The principle is a cutout: the phone works out the outline of the subject, then blurs the layer behind it. Apple says the iPhone 7 Plus runs the calculation at several levels to get the best result.

The stock camera app now has a "Portrait" option next to "Square" and "Pano." It wants the lens within 8 feet (about 2.4 meters) of the point of focus, and a line of small type tells you when you are too far away or too close, until it says you are good to shoot.

In this mode the phone uses the f/2.8 zoom camera. It lets in less light, and that tells on the picture. Our shooting bore this out.

In good daylight the simulated depth of field is fine. In dim light and at night, it is not.

From left to right: the shot before blurring, and after

From left to right: the shot before blurring, and after

The blurred background does make the picture prettier — no argument there. But it carries a lot of noise, the subject has obviously been sharpened, and the edges are not clean either: look at the rim of the cup on the right.

We shot the same scene with a Fujifilm X-T10 mirrorless camera and a 35mm f/1.4 prime. That lens weighs more than the whole iPhone 7 Plus, and its shallow depth of field looks plainly more natural, with none of the noise.

So this photo-prettifying feature belongs in bright light. At night its images cannot match either the iPhone 7 Plus's normal mode or the S7 Edge.

Portrait mode is still in beta, though, so the finished version may do better.

From left to right: iPhone 7 Plus, Fujifilm X-T10, Samsung S7 Edge, iPhone 6s Plus

No question: this is the best iPhone camera yet

Better hardware and better software put the iPhone 7 Plus well above the iPhone 6s, especially on optical zoom and at night. But to get the most out of it you may have to hold the phone steadier, or put it on a tripod.

What the iPhone 7 does to color overall is another matter — that one is down to taste.

There is a reason the S7 Edge briefly passed the iPhone 6s this year to become the best-selling phone in the United States. Its pictures are better than the iPhone 6s Plus's, and its warm tones have their own devoted following.

With this year's model, the iPhone has caught Samsung on the camera.

Cover image from VCG.