In the early days of the smartphone, Apple had a strong lead with the camera on the iPhone consistently besting its peers. There was a period somewhere in the middle where it lagged, but over the last several years, it has produced some of the best mobile cameras on the market, and it still delivers one of the best video capture experiences—even for aspiring filmmakers.
With the new iPhone 17 range—which includes the iPhone Air—Apple has a bevy of camera upgrades that go beyond more megapixels and larger image sensors. I had the opportunity to explore some of these new capabilities on the latest iPhones. Here's what they're like.
Smarter Selfies
You know how you shift your phone into landscape mode when taking a group selfie to make sure everyone is in the shot? Cue your phone slipping out of your hand because your grip was awkward, and now you have a cracked screen. If you've ever experienced that, you'll be happy to know that you no longer have to change your phone's physical orientation to capture a selfie in portrait or landscape mode.
This is all because the selfie camera on the latest iPhones has a square shape. Most camera sensors are rectangular, which is why you need to switch the phone's orientation to capture vertical or horizontal photos. With a square, paired with a wider field of view, the iPhone can automatically detect when more people are in the frame and will capture a horizontal photo even when you're holding the iPhone in portrait orientation. If it's just you, it'll use the portrait orientation.
While it can do this automatically via Center Stage—which auto zooms and auto rotates—you can manually tap a button on the screen to force it into a specific orientation too, say if you want to capture yourself standing in front of a landmark.
To give this a try, I open up the selfie camera, enable the new auto features via Center Stage, then take a selfie with my coworker, and the iPhone Air's camera automatically zooms out to include both of us in the frame. Later that day, I take a selfie with several people, and the camera flips to a horizontal orientation to make sure everyone is in the shot.