iPhone 13 Camera is blurry

Nope. No one here works for Apple. I am a user, just like you're a user.

I don't know what you want from anyone here on this user to user only forum. We didn't design the new cameras on iPhone. We can't deliver what you expect of them.

What I did before buying my new 13 Pro Max is researched all the features and learned that the pro models have close-up photography which the regular 13 doesn't have. I bought the Pro for this and the other enhanced features on the pro models.

I'm sorry you didn't know the difference. But it's not my fault and no one here can do anything about how close an iPhone 13 is capable of focusing.

If it is truly causing you so much anxiety, it might be a good idea to sell your phone and go buy something which won't cause anxiety. Life is too short to let a cell phone upset you this much.

I’m having the same issue. This frontal camera looks worse than my old Nintendo DS. I can’t believe how slow it looks too, i have the 13 pro max and coming from the X i cannot stand this. Might return this phone soon since Apple is not responding to this

You should return it if you can if you're that unhappy with it.

The camera is subjective; the 13 Pro Max is anything but slow, it's actually the fastest iPhone ever released.

If there is a software update that changes the behavior later to your liking, you can always purchase one then but life is too short to use a device you're going to be upset about.

I'm having the same issues with soft images. I'm on 13 Pro Max 15.1 and I'm getting soft focused photos. I've done direct side by side comparisons with my wife's 11 Pro and hers is sharper on everything but especially things with text. I've played around with all the various camera toggles suggested and nothing has helped. I've opened the photos on my computer to view and can confirm they are still soft viewed on a monitor. This is especially noticeable when there is text in the scene. It seems like the 1x lens is the worst. I'm not sure if this is defective parts or some funky software issue. I am very disappointed as I waited for 6 years (6S Plus) to get a new phone and camera improvements were my #1 requirement. I'm not sure if the Apple store will take this seriously for a replacement, seems like not everyone has an eye for image quality.

Who's photos are you replying about? If mine, I couldn't disagree with you more. The TV in my photos is not the subject and the show was on, while I was taking a photo which would naturally not show the show in focus in any way as it wasn't what was being photographed to begin with. I was showing how well iPhone 13 Pro captures close up pictures, which my photos prove are terrific.

nuama wrote:

The 13 series model have increased the pixel size on the sensor in order to get more light in low light. This means less real world information captured by the sensor = less sharp image.

That is not true.

If you had larger pixels on the same size sensor, that would reduce the resolution of the sensor, but the iPhone 13 has larger pixels on a larger sensor. The resolution remains 12 MP, as it was on the iPhone 11.

To quote one third party review:

"The iPhone 13's 1/1.9" wide (main) sensor captures 47% more light than the 1/2.55" sensor in the iPhone 12, thanks to the extra 11.3 mm^2 of surface area on the chip."

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6780391159/all-apple-iphone-13-and-13-pro-camera-upgrades-explained

If larger pixels captured "less information" then the iPhone 6 with its 1.5 μm pixels would be a world-beater and a Nikon D850 DSLR with its 4.35 μm pixels would be garbage.

Hi Is this your first Iphone? I can provide a lot of images compared to my previous iphone 12 pro max that show exactly this difference. I even requested a replacement unit and it is exactly the same. This processing makes images worst. I also had a 11 pro max before the 12. There is clearly something that does not working correctly. I agree with nuama 100% except that part with the size of pixels.

LOL. No. I have owned almost EVERY iPhone since my first iPhone 3G. The only phone I haven't owned is 7 or 8. I also had 11 Pro Max and 12 Pro Max. And still my 13 Pro Max outperforms the previous models. And I've been on this forum, helping users for over a decade now. So, I'm pretty knowledgeable about the different iPhone models.

I honestly can't tell the difference either. Mainly b/c the photos are so different - different scenes, lighting, subject size, etc. To do a proper comparison all things should be equal, with the only difference being the thing you want to compare. In this case, the iPhone.

Mark

I was so excited to purchase an iPhone 13 for the camera and to upgrade from my SE, but wow am I disappointed. I used my phone for my business social media photos when I didn't want to pull out my full size mirrorless camera, with this phone I don't even bother. Nothing will focus, if you do any sort of zooming in the item you're attempting to focus on distorts while everything else stays so crisp it looks questionable. I'm truly considering returning this phone.

It's actually interesting; the photos from the 13 all show shutter speeds at which motion blur/camera shake is a definite issue (1/50s or 1/60s as compared to 1/121s which is fast enough camera shake isn't as much of an issue.)

The optical telephoto lens does a substantially better job than digital zoom ever could.

Are you sure there was adequate light for the telephoto lens to actually be used? If there isn't, the phone will simply revert back to using digital zoom with the wide angle lens without telling you in any way that it's done so.

The only way to tell before snapping the photo is to slightly obscure the telephoto lens with your finger and see if you can see the obstruction on the screen; if not it's using the wide angle lens and applying a digital zoom.

Examining the EXIF data after taking the photo will tell you which lens was actually used.

The photo above was taken in conditions that are overcast enough I could easily imagine the two photos look identical because the telephoto photo was not in fact taken with the optical telephoto lens.

This isn't new to the 13 Pro; every iPhone back to the X has done this same "if light is low, use optical zoom on the wide lens instead of the telephoto lens" trick.

All those taken with f1.5 will be more blurred.

The brighter lens of 13 Pro and Max at full open has obviously degraded resolution (all prior generations had modest aperture and won't be degraded so much).

You can force the Camera app to switch to f2.2 or f2.8 by increasing the EV one or two step (swiping up when AF/AE locked indicator appears). Or you can use 3rd party app to manually dial in proper triangle.

Thank you so much! That indeed is very very interesting. Reading all those "everything is good" posts made me doubt my own eyes. ;)

Do you have an older iPhone (i.e. 12 pro) to see, in which way if it behaves different?

That was also my intention to say wanting to edit the post which apple does not let me.

If you have two phones, preferably a recent model like 11/12, not a SE 2016 and 8 like me, you should do the test on both 13 and older.