iPhone SE 2020 Phone Camera In-Depth Review: How Good Is the Budget iPhone’s Camera? By ZY Productions

Hey guys it's Z again, the second generation iPhone SE is one of the cheapest current gen iPhones. You can buy right now, so the question is for an iPhone that is quite clearly being marketed as a budget iPhone. How good is the camera? The lone rear camera on the SE is a 12 megapixel F 1.8 shooter, which has been the standard resolution, + aperture combination on flagship iPhones for many years on the primary cameras and actually still is today, and although there is no official information from Apple whether the second-generation SE shares the same camera hardware as any other iPhones in existence, there are tear downs like the ones from fixity. That strongly suggests that this is sharing the same camera hardware as the iPhone 8, so that in itself should already begin setting some expectations. There's probably nothing drastically surprising that we've never seen in any smartphone before that we are going to find on the SE, although there are some features that were at some point exclusive to the iPhone 11 and 11 pros that are now present on the SE, not all the features. However, just some of them like the ability to change the resolution and frame rates and video recording just by tapping on them from the camera screen on the other iPhones, you would have to go all the way into settings to change those.

The SE also gets the quick take feature which allows you to quickly record a video clip in photo mode simply by holding down the shutter button. We also get the incredible video stabilization. We first saw in the iPhone 11 and 11 pro cameras I'll be showing that a bit later in the video segments of this review. But there are two major features that were introduced with the iPhone 11s. That, sadly, did not make it onto the SE, and they are deep fusion and perhaps most unfortunately light mode.

Those will likely feature that Apple chose to reserve afford their high-end iPhones, but to their credit, they were already pretty generous in equipping the $400 S II with their 813 Bionic processor, which is state-of-the-art, the very same one that you would find in the iPhone 11 Pro. So while this might have the current generation flagship computing power, I would describe the camera experience as being comparable to a previous generation flagship iPhone, which mind you are actually not bad at all, but it is missing out on some of the latest features, specifically night mode and the. But now let's compare the image quality of the second gen s, II against two other iPhones are compared it to the iPhone tens main camera, which is supposed to be the same as the iPhone eight camera, which I do not have my hands on, but also be comparing it to the iPhone 11 pros main camera just to see how this stacks up against the current flagship in bright daylight. The SE is pretty much every bit as good as the current flagship. In fact, these shots from three different iPhones look visually identical to me.

If I didn't label, these I probably wouldn't be able to tell them apart in medium light kind of the lighting situation, you will experience indoors. We are still looking at incredibly close results. The SE is giving us great detail in color. However, the 11pro with its diffusion, is giving it quite an advantage over the other two at resolving fine detail at light levels like these and in low-light. The SE continues to do quite well.

It's at this stage. We start to see the SE begin to outperform the ten it's seeing deeper into the shadows, and it's also preserving detail better. We can see it better in this shot. This was taken in a really dark alley. The SE is definitely capturing fine detail better than the ten in low-light and if they do indeed share the same camera hardware, then we are looking right at the advantage of having an 13 chip for image processing, it's difficult to know exactly what's going on, but it could be a more refined noise reduction algorithm.

But in what I like to call the no light test, this is to show how big of a difference night mode can make, and why I think it's so unfortunate that the SE doesn't have it. These were taken in a kitchen, so dark. Even the human eye could not see anything now. Look what happens when I flip light mode on the 11pro? My motorcycle, oh the SC's camera is still very capable in a wide range of lighting situations and in many ways it is comparable to flagship camera film performance. However, when you are shooting with it in hand, it can be easy to get the impression that the s BS camera is inferior when compared to a flagship due to its display.

It is an LCD, not an OLED, so the preview in your viewfinder is not going to be as bright and contrast see when you are shooting it doesn't display HDR, even though the final actual recorded image might not really be that difference in quality, and one more thing is, this might not be the best display ever in a smartphone, but still actually quite surprised to discover that this is still a DCI p3 display. This film can take live. Photo is not really much of a surprise, they're pretty standard on iPhones, but it can also do portrait mode despite only having a single rear camera kind of like the iPhone 10 are, but it's also like the 10r in the sense that portrait mode only works on human faces, doesn't work on pets, doesn't work on objects, and that's probably because there is no actual depth data being captured with a single camera. So it's using AI to sort out what should be the subject and what should be the background, and it's only trained to identify faces. It does a pretty good job, actually not perfect, but it doesn't necessarily look worse than portrait mode on multi lens camera phones either, but funny enough.

This also means that it works on photographs of people. As long as it sees a face, portrait mode is also available on the front camera. It also works pretty well despite the front camera not being a depth sensing one like the ones on the face, ID iPhones. It is lower resolution, however, at only 7 megapixels and the dynamic range here is not as good as the rear camera. Probably not very surprising as well, but in video mode, the SE packs quite a serious punch.

It can do 4k up to 60 P and comparing it to the 11pro in bright daylight. Very close, although I would say that digital sharpening is a bit on the harsh side on the SE. But one thing to note is: while the SE does have smart HDR in video mode, it only works up to 4k 30p on the iPhone 11. It works all the way up to 60 P. So keep that in mind when you are recording 4k 60 on B, 2nd gen SE, now smart HDR doesn't always make a difference all the time, although in some particularly high contrast scenes, it can work wonders to save highlights that would otherwise be completely blown out.

So, depending on the situation, the choice is either between a high frame rate or increased dynamic range. Now low-light video is not excellent. It's certainly not as good as the iPhone 11s compared at 4k, but there is a very significant bump in though like video performance when you bring it down to 1080p at 30 frames per second, the front-facing camera has only one resolution and frame rate, however, is locked at 1080p 30 frames per second, no 4k, no snow fees either, but we do get slo-mo on the rear cameras. However, 1080p resolution at either 120 or 240 frames per second image quality is also slightly better at 120 compared to 240, and I mentioned earlier about video stabilization. The main camera already has optical image stabilization built-in.

But when you record a video, it seems to apply an insanely good digital stabilization to your footage, just like the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. Now you will not see it when you are recording the video, but once you play a back, it's kind of smoothed out magically all your little bumps and jitters, ultimately aside from light mode and diffusion, something that you surely wish. The SE also had been more focal lengths stuck on a 28 millimeter, equivalent lens. There will be times when you wish you had something either wider or with more reach, but arguably, even without those extra cameras, most would agree that this portrait dollar iPhone is already offering a lot of value for the camera system that it has onboard many of the budget. Android phones tend to offer multiple cameras in order to increase their appeal, but on the budget I fail, and it would seem that apples gone the route of giving it one good camera instead of splitting the cost into multiple mediocre ones.

So, in summary, for an iPhone that starts at $400, its cameras are obviously not going to be as good as the current flagship phones, but it's really not far behind, like I said earlier, the experience is very much comparable to a previous generation flagship iPhone still pretty solid, and those have been my thoughts on the camera system of, what's probably one of the most financially responsible phones of 2020 and the YouTube algorithm is now telling you to watch some of my other videos and I will see you in the next one I'm pretty sure. There's going to be that one comment that goes. Oh, my gosh, you are such an Apple fanboy. That camera phone is obviously trash because it's an iPhone.

Source : ZY Productions