Tetraprism Camera in the iPhone 15 Pro Max : Apple excels when it takes an existing concept and modifies it into something.
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The tetraprism is a periscope lens, but it is created by folding a prism into waves as opposed to rotating a long tube of lenses to lie along the iPhone’s body. This brilliant concept will make the iPhone camera system even more versatile.
“At 120mm with an aperture of 2.8, this will be a serious portrait lens and will create real background blur, rather than artificial software-generated blur, which can look unnatural,” said travel photographer Tom Bourdon via email to Lifewire. Because of this lens, I anticipate that many photographers will upgrade to this mobile device.
Tetraprism Camera in the iPhone 15 Pro Max Up Periscope
The iPhone has been surrounded by rumors of a telescopic lens for years, but now that it’s here, it’s even more intriguing than anticipated. Before discussing its operation, let’s examine its necessity.
If you’ve used a recent iPhone Pro model, you’ve seen the massive camera turret protruding from the rear. It exists to accommodate ever-larger lenses, which are required for larger camera sensors, and to add telephoto capabilities to the iPhone’s camera array. As we can see, however, that turret is already absurdly large and cannot grow much larger before becoming impracticable.
A periscope lens is precisely what it sounds like. It employs prisms to reflect incoming light through 90 degrees, allowing the lens to be longer, as it now runs parallel to the iPhone’s rear panel rather than protruding perpendicularly. This design has the disadvantage of requiring more capacity inside the camera.
Apple employs the periscope principle without the 90-degree rotation. In lieu of this, it has incorporated four links into an internal prism, each of which folds the light, allowing the light path to be longer while remaining in the same plane as all other regular lenses.
These kinks are contained within a single tetraprism, which keeps things uncomplicated and may contribute to the fact that the lens does not appear to absorb too much light, resulting in a maximum aperture of 2.8 (for this focal length).
A glass prism’s optical quality can be exceptional. Good SLR and DSLR cameras use pentaprisms in their viewfinders, which are glass blocks with five internal surfaces that reflect incoming light to your eye. This is contained within the large, inclined viewfinder block atop the camera.
Tetraprism Camera in the iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Lens Reach
So, what can a 120mm lens be used for? The apparent answer is that you can get closer to the subject due to the increased magnification. You won’t be able to distinguish your child from the other students in the next school performance, but by zooming in, you can eliminate a significant portion of the distracting background.
This telephoto lens is also ideal for portrait photography. The greater the subject’s proximity to the camera, the more distorted they appear in the frame. Close one eye, approach the visage of another person, and observe how bizarre their features appear from this distance.
Nose enlargement, receding cheekbones, etc. This is the reason why a wide-angle lens is so unflattering: it requires the photographer to get near to the subject.
Telephoto lenses magnify distant objects. It allows you to take frame-filling photos from a greater distance, resulting in much more flattering images. Due to the fact that a longer lens blurs the background more than a wide-angle lens, a subject is inherently separated from anything in the background.
And because the magnification is entirely optical, as opposed to a “digital zoom” that merely crops the image to display the center, the image quality is significantly superior.
“I sold camcorders several decades ago. Digital zoom is a horrible technology. In a Lifewire-hosted forum thread, former camcorder salesperson Jerry Fritschle stated, “It’s just electronic cropping, and at 100x, you’re just looking at a multicolored checkerboard.”
Let’s conclude with a rumor, as we began with one. Currently, the 15 Pro Max is the only iPhone with a tetraprism lens, but that will change in 2019. According to supply-chain sources, the regular iPhone 16 will get this excellent feature, so if you don’t like large phones, you can wait a year before replacing yours.
For many individuals, this single-camera upgrade may be sufficient to justify the purchase of a new phone, particularly portrait photographers. If not, this is almost undoubtedly the future of iPhone cameras.
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