iPhone 13 Camera is blurry

Same here. I have lens correction turned off, and it didn’t help. It’s becoming very hard to focus with iPhone 13 Pro. Whether it’s something 3 feet away, high up on the sky or close up in your face, when iPhone is switching between lenses, it’s as if it couldn’t decide which lens to use, or when it’s not switching the lenses, it just doesn’t know what to focus on.

Also, night mode with telescope lens is terrible. Even Jupiter is too bright for the lens that it becomes a glowing blurry dot, not to mention the moon. It’s just a really bright glowing circle to the lens.

I don’t know, maybe iPhone’s got great hardwares, but terrible software, or what is the problem? Camera is one of the best features on iPhone 13, and this is what we got.

The blurry happens not just when I’m using iPhone’s own camera app, but also when I FaceTime. I was trying to show my family the hotel room I stayed in, but it was just all a blur. It just couldn’t focus on a thing. It would go in and out of clear picture and blurry picture even when I’m not moving. This has never happened to my iPhone 7.

Absolutely FANTASTIC. Taken with a cell phone camera even more remarkable.

I wish people would take the time to learn even a little about photography and the camera in their phone. Instead, they don't have a clue which camera to use for which situation and come here and claim (falsely) that the cameras are crap.

Just to give everyone an update. Went into Genius Bar and they confirmed there was an issue with the camera focusing. He said it’s the third one that was returned due to camera quality.

I exchanged it and the new one I have had no issues.

Hello ~ Now…explain to me …how does a picture get any better? What would we have to go through to get that same picture with our other cameras? It just really amazes me to see it. Long ago I used to do some underwater photography and at times to achieve a “decent “ picture you were putting your life at risk…so this seems pretty remarkable that Apple can put all of these wonderful things together in an iPhone.

~Katana-San~

I would have needed to do a lot of prep to take a star photo like that with my DSLR.

I literally pointed my iPhone 13 up and tapped the shutter, less than thirty seconds total time, most of that tapping the camera app icon and figuring out where to point.

Hello ~ The only way I could do any better or try to would be to set up my Canon eos R6 on a tripod and play around for 15-20 minutes trying to get the shot that they took in a few seconds…I think that they have 2 excellent pictures. Taking a shot with a hand held camera of any kind anyone would be hard pressed to do much better. Plus a phone that I can talk to anyone in the world , a wallet, a photo album, a camera and a video camera, maps …and search the web etc….all in the palm of your hand. Plus you can take pictures at night. In my opinion…Apple has created nothing short of a miracle.

~Katana-San~

No, there was a cloudy day, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. From my opinion they are very pixelated, worse than my iPhone XS before could do. What worry me most is how things that are near the camera and should be in focus, aren't. Like the grass and the flowers just at the left on the second picture. There's no detail at all.

Well, it's a mystery to me, in places the white things on the rocks look like some have turned to whitish transparent liquid running down the rock!

Don't shoot me because I know nothing, but how steady was the Camera during those shots?

Yes! This is the exact problem I am having. It is HORRENDOUS. I was so excited for this phone because I loved the camera quality of my 11 Pro so MUCH and I was expecting even sharper quality. I have noticed other people have mentioned that their photos are worse when the Ultra Wide Lens is being used, but not when the Telephoto Lens is being used and I noticed that as well. Nevertheless, there is still a really gross after effect once a photo is taken where the saturation, sharpness, and also smoothing effects are seemingly put to 100, but with no way of turning it off. My fear is that this a hardware issue. As someone who is passionate about iPhone photography, this ABSOLUTELY ruins this phone for me and makes me want to return it so that I can get the nicer quality of my 11 back.

If Apple doesn’t amend this I don’t know what I will do. This will sever my trust with them completely.

I’m having the exact same issues since the beginning of this thread. When I take a picture a few seconds later it processes into a water colour type mess and when zoomed in it’s not sharp at all like some sort of aggressive filter has been applied to the image, the front facing camera is horrendous makes me look like I have a harsh skin condition with really bad over saturation it’s horrible! I did end up taking it to an Apple store after speaking to their support they said that the pictures should not be looking the way they are and that they can’t perform a camera repair or exchange the device under warranty as all the 13 Pro Max are on back order and out of stock. It also could be a software issue with HDR not working correctly as we have no option to toggle it off like we did in previous iPhones so it’s being forced all the time I really don’t understand why they took away this feature! I’m waiting for the next update as they have confirmed that the macro auto switching feature can be turned off so fingers crossed they tweak the camera and fix it. Really disappointed with this camera so far I’m getting better results in a 4 year old Samsung device.

What bothers me also is the zoom, you zoom in just a little and it’s not clear!! I don’t get how an Android phone can zoom very far out and be clear but an iPhone can’t when they are the same price almost! iPhone needs to step up the game in the camera area considering nothing else had changed majorly.

All zoom other than .5x, 1x and 3x (assuming bright light and an iPhone 13 Pro Max) is a digital zoom, which will degrade the image somewhat.

Different Androids do different things, but this is an area where Apple cannot "step up" anything. If the resolution of the Android screen is low enough it may appear digital zoom is lossless, but it's not.

For example, if you had 4K video but were viewing it on a 1994 CRT-based TV, you could digitally zoom in about 3x before you would notice the picture fuzzing out because of the comparatively poor resolution of the viewing device.

The only time you can digitally zoom in on an image without the picture getting blurry and/or losing detail is on a crime or spy show on TV or in a movie; in real life, never.

Possible Solution…

It appears that on taking a photo, iOS processes the image and over-sharpens it. To work around this, shoot in Pro-raw, open in a raw editor such as Lightroom and look at the sharpening values. Remove all sharpening values including sharpening %, width and details. This should fix the problem. Add sharpening back to taste.

Hope that helps a little!

We are hoping for a permanent fix from Apple, as doing this for hundreds of photos is no practical. I visited Kew Gardens yesterday and took almost 200 pictures. ProRaw means 25 MB each + the time to edit all of them. This shouldn't be the experience from a 1k £ camera phone.