iPhone 13 Camera is blurry

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i called Apple support, uploaded a screen recording to show the problem and they told me it’s because of slow wifi connection that the photo is uploaded to iCloud, blah blah. However, that’s not true because I use a 1GB internet connection at home. I was transferred to a senior technician who ran some diagnostic and said the hardware is all working fine. The technician recommended that I take the phone to a Apple Genius at the store who can hold the phone and see the problem.The suggestion by lobsterghost1 that the blurry photo is normal is incorrect!

It doesn't have poor processing; in fact it takes less than half a second for the photo to sharpen up after being taken and you never have that wait again.

Your iPhone XS Max didn't have anywhere near the kind of processing power the iPhone 12 or 13 families do.

If you don't like it, and it's been less than 14 days, return yours for a full refund.

Personally, I paid what I did for 13 Pro Max for just this kind of processing power.

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.

It all works perfectly for me.

What are you telling the camera to focus on? Are you setting a manual focus point? A manual exposure? For example, the moon is likely too bright for night mode without modifying settings. The same is true for DSLRs.

But to be able to take astrophotographs like this with a phone is completely insane.

Do not use the 3x lens in anything less than full light or it will be a digital zoom using the 1x lens which is likely what you do not want.

The cameras are good but not omniscient.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah same here I’ve noticed another issue when using video recording. 1080p 30fps or 60fps everything is clear and smooth works perfectly as soon as I switch to any 4k recording the image goes dull and it’s a jittery mess missing loads of frames not at all smooth. This has got to be a hardware issue on some handsets where a bad batch of sensors have been installed, so many people having issues with this camera some functions work fine and others do not. For me portrait mode is nice and clear but any normal picture taken is a mess and no detail when zoomed in and faces are grainy! It’s all a big mess! Apple have confirmed to me pictures should be sharp and not looking like a washed out mess

[Edited by Moderator] 

I completely disagree. I don’t think this is a scenario where you need a perfect control and an exact comparison. The subjects are of mountains, with similar lighting. I think that is a good enough comparison.

I especially disagree about the “different phones” aspect. The comparison being made here is that Apple’s camera quality should stay consistent, and should even exceed past phones’ camera qualities. In this case, the newer phones’ cameras are much worse. I think it is a good comparison to make, using two different models of phone from the same company. If an older model of phone has crisper quality of photos, while the new model behaves in a way where the camera is not even focusing or getting crisp quality at all, without the assistance of some post-shot effect, then the quality has greatly diminished.

Because it was taking a lower light photo via the front camera and was trying to do the best it could; you can see that by it trying to pull detail out of the black jacket.

Regardless, if you think it is your phone, get it examined:

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isazavakos wrote:

The comparison being made here is that Apple’s camera quality should stay consistent, and should even exceed past phones’ camera qualities. In this case, the newer phones’ cameras are much worse. I think it is a good comparison to make, using two different models of phone from the same company. If an older model of phone has crisper quality of photos, while the new model behaves in a way where the camera is not even focusing or getting crisp quality at all, without the assistance of some post-shot effect, then the quality has greatly diminished.

The cameras and images are better, but cameras are cameras and even a $6000 DSLR/lens combo will take horrid photos if lighting conditions/the atmosphere isn't cooperative.

I can (and do) get horrible photos with regularity with mine.

Why? Taking photos in poor light is the easiest way so I end up staring at sensor noise as above.

But I also get photos from my 13 Pro Max with regularity that leave me questioning why I bother taking a DSLR many places when the iPhone can get a photo 95% as good with far less hassle.

isazavakos wrote:

These images are from my new iPhone 13 Pro (left), and my older iPhone 11 Pro (right).

Similar lighting situations, nearly identical settings. The wide camera focal length was the exact same.

The focal length of the lens is the same.

What's not the same is you used digital zoom to zoom in much further on the iPhone 13 photo (121mm vs. 50mm, never use digital zoom if you want clarity, I don't know how many times that needs to be said!) and in poorer quality light (ISO 800 rather than ISO 640.)

The software is trying to do what it can to give you a usable photo in horrid lighting conditions using digital zoom - that's a recipe for disaster and it's amazing the photo looks as good as it does.

Disagree all you want. It is in no way, shape or form a valid comparison. Sorry, but it proves absolutely nothing. This is not defending either phone over the other. It is simply not a valid comparison at all. A true and valid comparison would be both phones taking a photo of the same subject (preferably mounted on a tripod) using the exact same camera settings. That would be a valid comparison. What you showed proves nothing. There are simply too many different variables, not to mention they aren't even the same scene.