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That is from the normal (24mm) camera slightly stopped down (f/1.8), judging by the EXIF.

Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.

I would hope that the telephoto lens does not show this so severely (because it has a fixed round aperture) but all mobile phone lenses in my experience have had a tendency towards a sort of concentric-ringed, quasi-soap-bubble bokeh; it's a common part of the challenge of really tiny optics (that you either like or dislike). (The iPhone X was really distinctive in this regard). So it's not too surprising to see the aperture do this on top of that.

As a general rule you don't see it in average images, but I guess sensors are now high-enough resolution that it's becoming more obvious, and the blades of a mechanical aperture might make it quite noticeable in some situations.

Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.

I've seen similar results from images I've taken using quality lenses but overly aggressive develop settings.

Reminds of vintage Meyer-Gorlitz or Zeiss Planar. I'm kinda into it.

Only professionals and enthusiasts care about bokeh. And I say that as someone that shoots my 50mm 1.2 wide open.

Previously the blur on iPhone was all software, apparently. I've set mine to do wide open with no bokeh, and i'll put it in after.

But to be honest, the iPhone is the camera I have on me, so the limits are acceptable. Can I force focus it? No. Can I get the glow? No. But iPhone + zoom + crop is better in some ways than my 50mm 1.2 with bokeh.

Ring shapes on this image? I’m a not a professional and I don’t see them.

Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?

I was wondering about that too, it seems like it's partly in this test report:

https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AppleiPho...

and then more context, especially for the less objective categories, in this test protocol description:

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-camera-image-quality-test...

It was a little annoying to find (About Us > How We Test) but not awful I suppose.

Ad hominem. Very low effort and maturity of thought.

It seems that in their ranking currently only the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is ahead?

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera

> But even with that they are still behind Android phones, while they dominated some years ago

Flagship Android and iOS device cameras have been 1a/1b for awhile. It's video where Apple dominated. Did Android make some huge strides in video lately?

until the "denoiser" starts to hallucinate

This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?

Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).

Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.

Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.

The Huawei uses a 1 inch sensor which is vastly superior in terms of hardware wrt to Apple's one

The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.

> You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras

iPhone, Samsung, Chinese phones, they all do fake moons now.

> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays

As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.

Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.

The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.

don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg

> what's with the downvotes?

Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.

> although being Android based it's not really an option for me. It'd be like trading a Porsche 911 for a Pontiac Aztec.

I use GrapheneOS for my own phone and have always been forced into iPhones at work.

iOS, after 12 years of use, is still so terrible that I can't just get over it.

I open my MacBook and will do whatever needs to be done from there.

I should probably get an iPhone for private use too though. It would surely stop me from being on my phone more than I'd like to.

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera

That’s harsh - the Aztek was not that bad …

I can understand you disliking an OS or vendor after getting used to another one, but there's no 911-Aztec comparison that makes sense here.

You're confusing a personal preference for a fact.

Always being five years behind everyone and doing its own boneheaded decisions that they inevitably have to walk back does tend to make Apple the Aztec in this case.

Mockery aside: it's all the same. They're all good enough for portraits where all you want is some depth of field & contrast, they're all good enough for landscapes where they capture colors pretty well, and they're all catastrophic past 5x zoom. You can take the top 10 of DXOMark (hell, the top 20) and you won't realistically find a difference unless you're pixel peeping. Which, we all know your phone pictures are just being sent compressed over Whatsapp, it doesn't matter. If you want camera quality pictures, get a camera. Even a 15 year old shitty Canon will take better pictures than the 18 Pro.

The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture IMO is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.

What are you inferring from that? Interested to hear.

What does it tell? Your comment seems weirdly cynical, but maybe that's my reading?

I mean, one of the uses is the statement "Its variable aperture is a particular strength, significantly improving the camera’s ability to maintain sharpness in complex scenes and when multiple subjects are present.".

DXOMark is a technical test with generally little narrative, so I'm not sure what your point even is. Would it surprise you that their reviews of SLR lenses, where the aperture is a critical element of the lens (and it would be a joke not to have one), they generally don't mention it at all?