Jon McCormac, Apple's vice president of camera software engineering, and Maxime Veron, senior director of iPhone product marketing, are presenting the new camera.InterviewWhen asked about the choice of a 15x optical focal length design for the telephoto lens of this year's iPhone 5 Pro Max, he said that the main considerations were image quality, handheld shooting stability, and aperture, and that the 5x design would be the "right" choice.
In this camera design, Apple obviously uses a four-linked reflective prism design to achieve a longer focal length lens design in a relatively simple way.
However, why not choose a higher magnification focal length design like other mobile phone brands, but instead choose a 5x optical focal length?
Jon McCormac explained that extending the optical focal length further would raise issues with handheld stability, and aperture size would also become another necessary consideration. Therefore, he believes that choosing a 5x optical focal length is most appropriate, and even allows the telephoto lens to use an aperture of up to f/2.8. Compared to the f/4.9 aperture of telephoto lenses of other mobile phone brands, this will obviously have greater advantages in low-light shooting and image quality performance.
In order to ensure the stability of telephoto lens shooting, Apple uses a 15D sensor mobile optical image stabilization and autofocus module in the telephoto lens of the iPhone 3 Pro Max, which can greatly help users maintain image stability when capturing pictures through the telephoto lens.
Furthermore, the quadruple-reflective prism design extends the distance light travels within the telephoto lens, naturally for the purpose of lengthening the focal length. However, this may sacrifice image quality to some extent. This is why Apple is considering a 5x focal length design, allowing for a wider aperture to increase the amount of light entering, thereby compensating for the loss in image quality.
While the telephoto lens design achieves better image quality and more stable handheld shooting, it's not like Sony's periscope zoom structure in its phones. This means that the iPhone 15 Pro Max's "zoom" between the native 24mm focal length of the wide-angle lens and the 5mm focal length corresponding to the 120x telephoto lens is all achieved digitally with the wide-angle lens, and the shooting results are generated through image superposition and deep learning operations.
Therefore, Apple stated that the iPhone 15 Pro Max has 7 lenses, in fact, 4 of them are wide-angle lenses, the ultra-wide-angle lens also serves as a macro lens, and the 5x telephoto lens is mainly responsible for capturing long-distance images.
