- The iPhone 15 Pro Max's quad-prism camera squeezes a big lens into a small phone.
- It's like a periscope, only better.
- It may appear in the regular iPhone Pro next year.
Apple is at its best when it takes an existing idea and turns it into something unique, and the new quad-prism "zoom" lens in the iPhone 15 Pro Max is one of its most stunning surprises in years .
A prism is a type of periscope lens, except it's made by folding the prism into a wave shape, rather than rotating a long tube of lens to sit along the length of the iPhone's body. This is a very clever idea that will make the iPhone's camera system more flexible.
"At 120mm at 2.8 aperture, this will be a serious portrait lens that will produce real background blur rather than artificial software-generated blur that can look unnatural," travel photographer Tom Bourdon told Lifewire via email. “I think a lot of photographers will upgrade to this phone because of this lens.”
The iPhone has been rife with rumors of a periscope lens for years, but now it's even more interesting than you imagined. Before we understand how it works, let's look at why we need it.
If you've used the latest iPhone Pro models, you'll notice the massive camera turret protruding from the back. It could accommodate a larger lens (necessary for a larger camera sensor) and add telephoto capabilities to the iPhone's camera array. But as we can see, that turret is already ridiculously large and can't grow much more before it becomes impractical.
A periscope lens is exactly what you think it is. It uses a prism to reflect incoming light at 90 degrees, which allows the lens to be longer since it now runs along the length of the iPhone rather than sticking out perpendicular to the phone's back panel. The disadvantage of this design is that it takes up more space inside the camera.
Apple uses the periscope principle, but without 90-degree rotation. Instead, it puts four links in the internal prism, each of which folds the light so that the light path is longer but still in the same plane as all other regular lenses.
These kinks are all within a single prism, which keeps things simple and probably helps the lens not seem to absorb too much light, resulting in a bright (for this focal length) f2.8 maximum aperture.
The optical quality of glass prisms is outstanding. Good SLRs and DSLRs use a pentaprism in the viewfinder, a glass block that reflects incoming light from five inner surfaces toward your eye. This is what's inside the high-angle viewfinder block on top of the camera.
So, what can a 120mm lens do? The obvious answer is that with the extra magnification, you can bring your subject closer. You won't be picking your child out from the other actors on stage at your next school play, but you can certainly eliminate a lot of distracting circumstances by zooming in.
A telephoto lens like this is also great for portraits. The closer you are to the subject, the more distorted the subject is in the frame. Get close to another person's face, close one eye, and see how strange their features are from here. Bulky nose, receding cheeks, etc. This is why wide-angle lenses are so unflattering—it requires getting closer to the subject.
The opposite is true for telephoto lenses. It lets you take frame-filling photos from farther away, resulting in better-looking images. And because long lenses tend to blur the background more easily than wide-angle lenses, your subject will naturally become separated from anything behind it.
And because the magnification is all optical, rather than using "digital zoom" that effectively crops the image to show the center, the quality is much better.
"I sold camcorders years ago. The digital zoom was really bad. It was just electronic cropping, and at 100x all you saw was a colorful checkerboard," former camcorder salesman Jerry Fritschle contributed in a Lifewire forum post Zhong said.
We started with rumors, so let's end with rumors. Currently, the only iPhone with a prism lens is the 15 Pro Max, but that will change next year. Supply chain sources say the regular iPhone 16 will get this great feature, so if you don't like the big-screen phone, you can wait a year before throwing the phone away and replacing it.
For many people, the camera upgrade alone may be worth the purchase of a new phone, especially those who frequently take portraits. If not, just wait, because this is almost certainly the future of iPhone cameras.
