iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Blurry and Out of Focus

We are here to exchange issues and give working solutions if we know or we should not be posting anything. Reseting will not fix the issue of grainy pictures as multiple people have reported already.

Only thing worthwhile is to head to apple genius bar and compare your phone to the phones there. Main camera should match the store phones. Selfie cameras dont match demo phones i have seen this myself with three phones at apple store at yorkdale Toronto. That is over processing issue with software itself and apple has to fix that bug in future updates. Last update did mention apple did fix some camera bugs as per zollotech but i did not notice anything with selfie quality.

Restoring phones with big data like mine takes few hours of someones precious time. Resolution should be complaint specific. Nothing personal here.

I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t more of a user problem than a phone problem. The vast majority of people simply haven’t encountered 48mp before; it’s quite unforgiving if your shooting technique is not exact. It tends to amplify the smallest mistakes, and it takes some time to get used to. People were saying the same thing when Nikon released the d800 (36mp) some years ago, and I experienced it myself at the time. IMHO that’s all this is.

I return my iPhone 15 Pro Max and stay with my 11 Pro Max. The 11 Pro Max has better battery / efficiency, better camera in certain conditions, feels way better in my hands, better sound quality. I was happy to change after 4 years, but I am amazed (in a bad way) how little has changed. Apple Support was completely useless. There was obvious hardware damage on the main camera and they don't even care. In my opinion: Price/Value is bad since iPhone 14 - at least for the Pro-Models. Sad to see drop in support and product quality. Tested 13 Pro Max from a friend vs. 15 Pro Max and yeah the 15 Pro Max has some better photos, but some pictures are way worse. USB-C doesn't work with the original Apple Thunderbolt-Cable I use to run my Macbook Air on big display. iPhone just doesn't show anything. Another cable worked fine - but total useless to use external display if they don't have a desktop-modus where I can use my keyboard and mouse without problems or changing 100 settings to adapt.

All in all a nice (useless) upgrade. The phone looks good, the functions aren't worth the upgrade (for me).

iPhone 11 Pro Max just feels like its something "finished". iPhone 15 Pro Max feels like it's not fully thought through. Like the "closest focusing distance" of the main camera. There is a gap between main camera lens and the macro-modus. If you shoot photos within that range there will be blurry and unsharp photos (on the edges) as a result. You need to keep more distance to make sharp photos of newspapers, documents, etc. and crop. Same for photographing other close-distance objects.

Worst upgrade in my life. Used apple devices since 2012 and I'm now looking at options outside the apple realm.

-----------

TL;DR:

-----------

If you really want to upgrade from an iPhone 11 Pro Max (or lower), I would suggest to have a look at the iPhone 13 Pro. The biggest gap in differences is closed with that upgrade. There is little change from 13 Pro to 14 Pro to 15 Pro and the 13 Pro has good battery, really good photo quality, good display, good price/value, good speakers, good (enough) CPU.

No luck at the Genius Bar so thank you for this tip!! I turned off the "Portraits in Photo Mode", "Macro Control" and also "Lens Correction" and the front camera photos were more normal. The grainy, out of focus, selfies with grey shadows disappeared. Nothing like spending $1500 for the iPhone 15 PM and spending a week trying to figure out why the camera was worse than my 12 Pro... not sure why these are default settings out of the box.

Hi all everyone who as had a problem with the iPhone 15 pro max with photography and video please please call up or chat the Apple as I just brought a iPhone 15 pro max and the picture and video quality was diabolical! It a was like the photos were taking in the 1940s or something. The photos were out of focus, grainy, and just overall horrible! I did everything that the agent on the Apple chat told me to do and it made no difference I didn’t ask them to address this problem to the manufacturers that there is a problem with the iPhone 15 pro max, and I said nobody else had complained to Apple with such a problem and I was the only one so please people if you get this problem with the iPhone 15 pro max chat to them through Apple chat or phone them directly I did both and on both occasions they said nobody had come forward about this issue in the iPhone 15 pro max. I will try and upload some images that I took took on the iPhone 15, pro max and my current phone which is an iPhone 14 and there is a **** of a difference. I have returned my iPhone 15 pro max in the hope I get a better replacement! Because this iPhone 15 pro max is worth £1399.00 if it take photographs like these.

These photos above were taken on the iPhone 15 pro max.These photos above are taken on the iPhone 14 you can see the difference in the quality of the pictures. I have not uploaded some of the really good pictures because I don’t want people to claim them as their own! But you can certainly see what I mean!

please please guys complain, and report the iPhone 15 pro max issue!

tilly

Completely agree, the main camera still has a focus issue.

One problem with how people are using the iPhone 15 Pro max is to not realise that the lenses are prime lenses. That is, they do not zoom. Zooming is done by switching between lenses and digital wizardry smoothening the transition. So the cameras are best at their native zoom. ie for 15 Pro it is 1X, 0.5X and 5X, for the Pro it is 1X, 3X and 0.5. If you are using the camera at any other zoom level you will get digital processing to upscale the image and loose quality.

The issue that I see is that even when using them as primes, there is still a focus issue and pics are worse than my 13 Pro. Also interesting is that the iPhone can still choose the main lens when you are at 3X on the 15 Pro for example, I think when it decides that a digital zoom of the main camera will give better results than the prime zoom of the telephoto camera. Apple needs to do some more work on optimising the focus and post processing. I really hope there is no hardware issue.

You're ignoring the difference in sensor size and resolution, which is why the iPhone 13 Pro could give a "clearer" image with its lower resolution, smaller sensor than a larger, higher resolution sensor can.

In the end, it's not a bug or misfeature, it's a design compromise due to the way optics and sensor sizes work, the byproduct of the higher resolution and larger sensor revealing the limited focusing ability as you get further from the center of a lens that small with that wide an aperture for that focal length.

In contrast, lenses for smaller sensors are better able to focus uniformly due to their size.

As stated, you can complain to Apple if you wish:

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

but if it's a problem for you you'll need to go back to an iPhone 13 - and avoid all other high resolution, large sensor phones as well such as the iPhone 14 Pro / Pro Max, Google Pixel 6, 7 and 8 and the Samsung Galaxy S22 and S23.

If taking photos of text is your thing, the fun workaround for the iPhones as well as the Android devices is to take a few steps back and take the photo with the telephoto lens instead, which will give you the greater edge to edge sharpness you seek.

So, I updated 15PM to the latest iOS release couple days ago. Today me and a friend who has 14 PM took the same photo from the same distance with exact same settings (it was a group photo of 20 people). We exchanged photos and I verified all the settings were identical including the focal length of 24 mm and f of 1.78. 15 PM was much more clear when faces were enlarged. Other than that photos looked identical. I feel like maybe latest iOS update did something to improve the quality. Before the update I felt like my old iPhone 12 PM was much much better in terms of photos across all the settings and focal lengths.

It's not doing anything wrong, it's working as designed.

However, if you don't like the processing, you can take photos in ProRAW mode or use a third party app like Halide or Lightroom to shoot in true RAW mode and then apply your own processing afterwards.

• About Apple ProRAW - Apple Support
• Take Apple ProRAW photos with your iPhone camera - Apple Support

You may also make your thoughts known to Apple here:

Feedback - Camera - Apple

If your photos look like that, make an appointment to have your phone examined as it is not true of other iPhone 15s.

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

What worked for me on my 15pm, back up , set up as new, restore backup , reset all settings. Now the photos and the videos quality and autofocus is a new story. Good luck

If that's the case it's likely the light was low enough what you were doing was using digital zoom.

The same is true if you use any zoom level other than .5x, 1x, 2x or 5x; don't do that.

Incredibly frustrating and ridiculous. This is my most expensive iPhone (1 TB), and it reminds me of iPhone 4 (whose color distortion issues were never fixed). Having seen reports here of positive results from doing an express replacement, I scheduled an evaluation and presumed that would be the result. Nope. They doubled down and said they can only do a replacement when their diagnostic reveals problems. They lead by saying they cannot use any photos taken outside of their store as evidence, and then they changed their tune when I took ones in the store that reflected clear problems. I requested a manager, and his solution was to shoot pics with a demo iPhone 15 Pro. Sure enough, they were just as distorted as mine. Therefore, it’s not a problem with my device. Case closed. 😤

I switched from a 13 Pro to a 15 Pro and I also noticed right away that the quality of the photos is significantly worse.

With the 13 Pro, I had to work hard to take a bad photo, they were always sharp and colorful, especially in daylight.

With the 15 Pro, I have the feeling that the autofocus is always minimally off. For example, when I take a picture of my son, he is recognized as a subject (yellow frame), but the face/eyes are never 100% sharp, however, it looks like other areas in the photo are sharper.

Now it's not that you can't look at the pictures, but the quality has definitely gotten much worse, I notice it every time I compare the current 15 Pro photos to my old photos from the 13 Pro.

I really hope it's just a software problem and that enough people report it.

I have problems with the new main camera too. The 5x zoom is fine, the macro is amazing but the main camera keeps having problems. I was at the Apple Support and they kept ignoring my photos of my main camera lens and said its nothing bad with it. But here i can show you my photo of my main camera lens:

They didnt want to swap my phone. They just said i can buy another iPhone 15 Pro Max if i want. What the **** is this support. I have made pictures with an iPhone 13 Pro Max at same distance, same lightning conditions and same position, focus, etc. and here is the difference:

Bottom: 15 Pro Max

Top: 13 Pro Max

But i have dozens of photos where 13 Pro Max does better photos. Even iPhone 8, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone 12, and 7 year old phones of the competition did better in shooting documents / newspapers / etc.

Maybe your lenses are defective too. But for me Apple didn't want to hear about the lens, they kept saying the photos are fine. It was the worst "support" I've ever experienced anywhere.

After 11 years of using Apple products I consider looking at different options.