iPhone 13 Camera is blurry

Hi! Just tried it out and didn’t change anything, when a person comes in frame you notice it the most, face is smooth (especially in low light) and too highlighted. Had to take a picture from snapchat to show how his hair is in real life because others where to big to upload here.

Surely macro mode shouldn't be this bad quality? This mode has also changed the colour and looks so grainy!! I understand the lighting is quite dim in these photos but it shouldn't change the photo quality that much like this? Macro mode is on the left. Although the normal mode in the right looks fine, I've been having issues with taking photos for my food account on Instagram. My iPhone 11 Pro camera was way better at taking close ups than my iPhone 13 :( what do I do?

Hello again ~ This is from the Samsung community posting problems. I am not going to put up anything false here to defend a position for anyone or anything. If my iPhone was doing this I would post that as well. This picture doesn’t look “natural” either.

~Katana-San~

I've experienced all of the problems mentioned in this thread with my new 13 Pro Max. Selfie lens over smoothing, making my skin look like wax. Blurred and over smoothed watercolor-like images taken on the 3x telephoto that remind me of a 2009 Nokia. The main lens being totally unsuccessful in focusing on certain items, particularly in low light shots or when shooting through a window. Macro/Bokeh auto switching in a completely erratic fashion. And to add insult to injury, even the allegedly light-sensitive main lens has been steamrolling overcast skies, especially if shot through a window. Last, when shooting in a low light interior with the main lens produces dark artefacts on the corners that didn't use to be there with 11 Pro.

No amount of settings toggling helped improve those results. Although the broad daylight pictures turn out fantastically sharp and nicely calibrated, any other condition (low light and indoors) has produced potato results. I returned the phone and switched back to the reliable combo of my old 11 Pro + Halide. I've had several people second guessing my experience and suggesting I have a faulty unit, but there's a slew of user reports and feedback about this issue, Sebastiaan de With (founder of Halide) also covers this problem on his review of 13 Pro. Below just a sample of the aggressive oversmoothing by the 3x lens - the detail of the cars is gone, and the text on the record is not even legible!

I'd be disappointed enough if the camera performance had stayed the same over 3 generations, but to actually make it worse on the latest and greatest model? That makes me livid with whoever is in charge of Apple's QA!

Mine too! it's driving me mad as i mainly upgraded for the camera and paid over 1k for a selfie camera in low light that performs worse than an iPhone 4!!

2 images attached are last night at 3am when baby woke and just had a lamp on, plenty bright enough for a decent clear photo and then a normal selfie in standard light, as you can see the quality changes dramatically as soon as the light drops a bit

Any time you use the zoom the image gets distorted. apple is being really arrogant these days. any time you criticize them too much they delete your post too. I took these pictures of a weasel that listed me at work today and used the zoom to get close without scaring him/her and the pictures are pixelated.

Hello!i found this comparison.

Lens x3 tele. cropped.

iPhone 14 pro Max left vs iPhone 13 Pro Max on the right.

It looks like 14 pro is using a different (photonic 😅🤭) way to process pictures.

It looks much better than the "oil painting effect" of iPhone 13 Pro .

Did anyone notice this?

[Edited by Moderator]

Yup. Here's niter disappointing picture supposedly taken with the world's best phone. It seems mostly to occur with the zoom feature which is no surprise. They use a digital zoom feature which is terrible on every phone I[ve ever used. My son participates in a ,lot of sporting events and I take its of pictures. Every time, without fail I download all the images into my computer and a good half or more of them are of such poor quality I delete them.ets pixelated and washed out.

Without knowing exactly which camera you used (you can choose the wrong camera for the scene you're taking a photo of), comparing your wife's phone to your iPhone is a meaningless comparison. I admit the photo isn't good. But you could have been zoomed in using the wrong camera and got the best result that camera and setting could have taken.

Sure, these are for the most part point and shoot cameras. But choosing the right camera for the job makes all the difference.

Do you honestly know about the cameras and their setting options on your iPhone? Or did you just take a bad photo and decide the cameras on your iPhone are not good?

Hrre's a photo I took with a 13 Pro when I still had it. Seems pretty decent to me:

I have an iPhone 13 mini for a week now. A +750€ phone with supposedly superior software and hardware.

All you apple warriors here can now be quiet for a minute please. The camera close range issue is unacceptable.

I was talking to an apple employee online already and went to the Apple Store. Where another employee made a picture with my iPhone 13 mini, looked at it speechless, and tried the same on his own 12 mini. And his phone performed just fine.

So we instantly arranged a repair. He couldn’t believe his company is selling such a device. So I’ve got a whole new camera installed. And I already have the phone back now. But nothing changed. It’s still the worst camera I’ve had in an iPhone… I don’t expect a 3000€ DSLR. But I want to be able to take pictures of a note on a post-it. Now I’m sitting here and can’t even take a picture of a pack of gum without taking a step back and abuse digital zoom to the limit.

Everything else about this phone is perfect. But this lens is really a pain for daily tasks. It’s not only a pain, it’s straight unusable.

I don’t want to hear a word about wrong expectations or any other excuses that does not work towards a solution. Nobody with eyes installed to their head can deny that issue the camera has. Everything bellow 12cm is impossible to focus. And even the 13 Pro Max with the fancydancy Makro Mode can’t reach an older iPhone.

Stop calling that stuff macro. I’m not asking for macro pictures. They just took the ability to take closer pictures with the mini, added some workaround with the wide angle lens for the pro, called that „macro“ (still was worse than the iPhone 12) and left the 13 mini alone with the issue.

Why can’t you be angry about this? So your advice would be to get the older 12 mini to be able to take a normal picture of a credit card for example?

Again. I don’t want or need macro. This is macro.

I just want to be able to take normal pictures of anything around the size of an orange.

And again. 3 people at the genus bar yesterday said that this is very weird and shouldn’t be like that. It’s not just customers complaining and nitpicking.

I fiddled around with it for quite some time now. Read many articles about it that also tackling this complaint and trying to find a solution. And yes, the take a step back and zooming in seems to be the preferred workaround for most of them. But still nobody is satisfied.

But if that’s the one and only method to take a non-blurry picture of smaller sized items it’s still really bad for a 800€ phone. Doesn’t matter if you take the pro or the mini. The pro is surprisingly bad too.

I don’t know what phone you currently have, but try two things please and tell me you’re satisfied with it: take a picture while zoomed in and see the resolution compared to a normal picture. They’re identical. This is as you might know due to the artificial upscaling of the zoomed picture. That’s fine but I’m many cases not desirable.

It basically looks like the „posterised“ effect in photoshop and really messes with your picture.

Im telling this because that upscaling and messing takes effect every time I use that preferred „step back and zoom in“ workaround.

So… you might already see my issue here. Many many pictures I made with a 800€ phone looks like I’ve used a really old and bad camera and ran it though an upscaler software in post to get the most out of a bad camera.

At least 1/4 of my photo library is now artificially modified. When you decide to use digital zoom this is definitely desirable. But of course everyone with at least a little bit interest in cameras hate digital zoom and prefer the native resolution. Understandable if you ask me. So you move your *** and come closer to the thing you want to make a picture of. Oh well, that’s not possible anymore. You you have to live with messed up pictures made with digital zoom.

And now we pretend this is fine even tho a fair share of customers complain about this. And apple doesn’t even bother to explain why they made it that way.

That’s the first actually helpful comment. Instead of shoving it all to „you just use it wrong/you chose the wrong device/that’s not apples fault“. More addressing why so many people could be mad. I mean… it’s not that we all decided to randomly be angry because we’re bored. It’s a specific issue we’re asking here and apple at least should leave a statement on why it is like that. Thank you.

And it’s really interesting that the pro of your dad is that good. Because comparing my mini with the pro max of my sister, it’s really hard to tell any difference. They’re basically identical. Apart of the macro setting the pro has of course. But that still looks bad. Do your dad also get surprisingly bad results when taking pictures in the supposedly beautiful and crisp macro mode with distortions and unsharp areas everywhere but in the middle of the picture?

What you describe is how ultra-wide angle lenses work, whether in macro mode or not and whether on a phone or on a $5000 DSLR or mirrorless camera.

They will be sharpest in the center with distortion and blur occurring the further you get toward the edges due to the curvature of the lens and the relatively large aperture.

For example, you can see the blur at the edges here in a photo taken with a $900 lens on a $4000 DSLR even though it was taken at the comparably very small (high depth of field) aperture of ƒ/6.3 as opposed to the 13 Pro/Max Ultra-Wide’s ƒ/1.8.