A Few More Thoughts on Smartphone Cameras (Premium)

With my Pixel 9 Pro XL review complete, I set out to make the sometimes painful shift to another smartphone, in this case the iPhone 16 Pro Max I'll review next. I had spent some time with the Max the previous weekend during a trip to visit our son in upstate New York, but other than that, I'd pretty much focused my attention on the Pixel. But that has to change, as it must.

I wasn't planning or expecting to write about smartphone cameras now. Heading into this shift, I was thinking more about the best ways I might compare the AI features on each platform, and how that might be complicated by Apple's slow-boil Apple Intelligence release schedule. Apple and Google couldn't approach AI more differently, it feels like a big story.

But then I got bogged down by some forgotten realities. I'm on Google Fi, and while activating the eSIM on a Pixel is as seamless as seamless can be, doing so on an iPhone requires specific manual configurations, and I must have screwed up something on the first pass because MMS texts weren't working properly. So I re-copied and pasted each setting, rebooted the phone, and tried again. And then started why this was even necessary. And why, conversely, when I move in the other direction, there's always something wrong with text messaging despite me closely following Apple's instructions for that process.

Anyway, I think it's OK. But I also needed to install a few apps I had somehow missed in my initial pass--United, as we're flying tomorrow, and Hue, for our smart lights--which reminded me that I also need to download music so I can listen to it offline on the flight if needed and ... I don't know, maybe I'm not as ready as I thought.

But all this, in turn, made me look again at the iPhone Camera settings: After a short work trip to Dallas, we're going to be in Mexico City for 6 weeks, and I will be using the iPhone daily for most or all of that and want the photos to be as good as they can be. And I was not happy where I left things. This is especially true with the new Photographic Styles. Which I find confusing.
Photographic Styles trades power for complexity
This is overly simplistic, but when I think about the top three flagship smartphones, all of which I currently own, all perform an astonishing amount of computational photography processing to varying degrees of success. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra delivers overly-saturated shots, to my eyes. The iPhone is a bit dull by default, or no doubt what Apple would call "natural" or even "realistic." And the Pixel delivers this Goldilocks-like perfection, with just a bit of HDR contrast bump. I love how Pixel photos look, and I love that I don't have to do anything to make it happen. It just works.

Apple addressed my complaints about the dull default iPhone photos by adding the Photographic Styles feature to its Camera app a few years ago. Until recently, these were simple presets you could configure, on the fly or permanently, to change the look of the...