Reviews, Technology

iPhone 11 Pro Max Review

iPhone 11 Pro Max Midnight Green

The iPhone 11 is out and as usual I got my hands to a set. This time I went for the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

This year the order frenzy changed from morning Singapore time to night. I got mine through telco contract renewal. Starhub as usual, tried to improve their process and came up with a virtual online queue system. The result, was a complete disaster.

And as a Platinum customer, this year they did not invite or give priority to Platinum customer. Nonetheless I still managed to receive my new iPhone on the 20th of September.

Initial Feel

I chose the new colour – Midnight Green

The unusual thing this year is that for the first time the rear of the iPhone is the feature image on the box. Naturally if the focus of the 2019 iPhone is the camera all marketing effort should be made towards featuring it.

Upon opening the box cover the rear of the camera is presented. And honestly, I think the lenses area looks like shit. There is nothing pretty about it and it looks crude and unfinished. Steve Job wouldn’t have approved it if he was still alive.

After the initial disappointment by the lenses design, the phone began to appeal to me, in other ways besides the poorly designed lenses.

As usual the build quality is unequaled by any handset maker. It is simply top notch finishing. The back cover of the phone is actually a piece of glass with matt finishing 😧. Kinda back to iPhone 4 feel but at least it is not a fingerprint magnet. And the whole glass back sort of blend into the aluminium casing as if they two materials were casted as one.

Ugly Camera Beautiful Photos

The first thing I wanted to try was the much hyped camera. And this is where the iPhone 11 Pro really shines.

A little background about myself. In my younger days I was a freelance commercial photographer. My life evolved around photography for a decade. My investment in Nikon gears were in the tens of thousands of dollars. My completed assignments were from glamour magazines to MotorGPs. I am no stranger to what a good camera should be equipped with.

The first feature I wanted to try so badly was the new Night Mode.

As any photographers will tell you low light performance of camera comes with a big price tag and is only accessible by Professionals on professional equipment. And low light performance has a trade off, noise. Noise will become a problem when ISO are pushed to the limits.

iPhone Night Mode low light performance
Night Mode in dark room

The photo above was taken in near darkness condition. The room was only illuminated by the single fluorescent light tube outside the window. My eyes are telling me it is near complete darkness.

Even with my D700 DSLR, in such lighting condition with ISO pushed to 6400 or higher such clarity is not achievable, not without. the help of a tripod. And the noise level in the Night Mode was very well managed and controlled. I really need to give it to the engineers at Apple.

iPhone 11 Pro Night Mode
Another awesome Night Mode shot. Click for 100% quality.

The above photo is another fine example of the quality image output by the camera and Night Mode.

Traditionally, under such lighting conditions, the motorbike under the street lamp will be metered and exposed correctly while the silver car and objects not illuminated by the brighter street lamp will be under-exposed.

However, the iPhone 11 Pro has the advantage of not only lens and metering system, but with computational power as well. This gives the iPhone 11 Pro unparalleled hardware rendered HDR images. I cannot produce such a photograph with my DSLR, not without some post processing with Lightroom or Photoshop.

Like I mentioned earlier, low light performance usually comes with noise. In the above photo it is amazing that the noise level was minimal and details in the photo were preserved nicely, for example the license plate number of the silver car.

This kind of readily usable photos are why I prefer using iPhone for daily candid photo taking instead of relying on my DSLR. There is simply no need to further post processing on a computer.

One thing to note is that Night Mode is NOT AVAILABLE in ultra-wide mode.

To be continued…

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