IPhone 12 Pro Max Auto Focus issues ongoing

Thank you for your prompt reply. Glad to know Apple is monitoring the support communities.

I went to the page you suggested and it was an explanation of exposure comp. I am well aware of exposure comp and use it to avoid blown out skies. Under exposure can be fixed. Over exposure cannot be fixed as all the detail has been lost. So i often lower the exposure 1.5 EV to get a blue sky and dark foreground.

My problem is strictly focus. Nothing in the suggested page said anything about focus other than it is automatic.

My photos of flowers and bees I took with an iPhone 10 would focus sharper and closer than the supposedly improved iPhone 12.

From my reading online I believe my device is either defective, physically broken, or poorly designed by Apple.

How can I know for certain what is the problem? You saw my sample images. The camera cannot focus sharply at any distance..

i have full AppleCare. I made a mistake buying the 12 because the rumors were that Apple only improves the camera every other model. The 11 for example offered nothing better camera wise than the 10.

So my false assumption that the 13 would be like the 11 and I would be safe buying the 12 proved to be a bad guess on my part.

I cannot buy the 13 until i have made a years worth of payments on the 12. I have only made 7 payments.

Since I am stuck with this dog for almost half a year more, I need it to work and at the moment I am not getting the image quality I expected.

My sample images prove it. The question remains is the problem hardware that replacing the device might solve or is it the camera software system, design, and execution that is faulty?

[Edited by Moderator]

A moderator also removed the images I posted and edited the remaining image to sharpen it. All the descriptions of how the photo was shot from a camera on the floor with a time delayed shutter was removed. No mention was made that my post was exited by a moderator.

i will post the two images taken from the front camera sitting on the floor again.

[Edited by Moderator]

I read the link you shared of the device specifications and could not find the specification to which you refer regarding focus. Perhaps you could point out specifically where in the specifications this is addressed?

I went on a photo shoot with a professional photographer last week. We shot the same image. The second image below was shot on a $350 Sony Compact Digital Camera. The image directly below was shot on a $1,400 Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Just look at the red stick, the black spot on one stone, and the edges of the stones. Same day, same light, same subject, two different results clearly visible without zooming in. Which image is sharper? Nothing was edited in any way. These are camera original images. What is also telling is I can zoom in on the Sony image without it going way out of focus, while the iPhone image will get very blurry.

I am traveling now but will return home in a few days, where I still have my old iPhone 10s Max and will put both devices on a tripod and do some focus tests on text at various distances from lens to subject. But until then, I stand by my assertion that my iPhone 12 Pro Max has focus problems.

Check these discussions:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252108915\ (in addition to responses, 280 other users checked “I have this problem too”)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252063233 (in addition to responses, 1288 other users checked “I have this problem too”)

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-12-pro-camera-cannot-focus-up-close.2263511