iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Blurry and Out of Focus

Took this photo the other day in bright sunlight and as you can see from the crops came out horrendously noisy. I hope Apple is actually reading this, because I have never been so unhappy with a phone camera in my life.

Grainy photos look like we capture on some 10-20k phones. please someone tell me , is this software issue or we got defective phones??? Please anyone answer me , I hardly manage money for this phone just for camera and this happened with me😭😭😭

@Dogcow-Moof

just one little thing: would you mind to take a picture of a text document and post it here? If you say your camera is fine, it should all be super sharp. Just pls make sure the photo would cover the whole a4 page.

Personally I would much rather have the face be the focal peak rather than the eyes.

I'm not trying to defend Apple, though the feature works beautifully. Read the Canon and Nikon forums and you will see people making the same complaints about eye AF on the R3 and Z9.

The yellow box denotes the face has been detected as a face; what part of that face is the focus peak is not disclosed, just as with face detection on cameras like the Nikon D850.

It has worked "perfectly" so far because with older devices with smaller sensors "sharp focus" was in fact soft enough you couldn't tell, not unlike when you move from a 12 MP sensor mirrorless to a 48 MP sensor mirrorless.

In the end, leave feedback at the link I gave and Apple will try to address it as they are always working on it; it's just even the photographic "big players" don't get it perfect.

No one here not explicitly identified as an Apple employee is.

Rather the information regarding computational photography was from a general information web site and developer information I have posted was delivered to developers at WWDC (2021) and via Apple's Developer site.

If there's ever a disparity between what a developer says and what Apple implemented, it's always easiest to check what Apple actually told developers when the feature was introduced.

If Apple made an error, they will work to correct it; if a feature is as it was designed, they obviously will not.

If an item would violate the laws of optics or physics to implement, they obviously can't, and that's the reason for increasing minimum focus distances as the image sensors in cameras grow larger.

(Note that the minimum focus distance for the 1x lens of the iPhone 15 Pro Max is approximately the same as that for the main lens on the Samsung Galaxy S23, and both the Galaxy and the Google Pixel 8 Pro also rely on their macro lenses to focus closer than 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. 😤

Im extremely disappointed with my 15 pro max. I felt like my 13 pro max took better photos. I’ve been buying iPhones since they came out but I think this may be the last one I own. For the price it’s absolutely ridiculous. The photos look terrible after capturing.

Here’s Reddit at it’s best, being better than Apple’s support as usual. Here is the workaround:

"With a larger sensor comes a larger distance required to avoid blurry photos.

To avoid the auto-switching of the cameras like that, go to Settings > Camera and enable "Macro Control". Then also enable "Macro Control" in Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings.

Then open the Camera and get it close enough to something or put your hand in front of the camera as though you want to do a macro shot or a macro video of your hand or whatever it is in front of the camera so that you can get the Macro Mode indicator on the bottom-left. When you see it, turn it off. That way it will no longer automatically switch to Macro Mode unless you tap it to turn it on. If it's yellow, it's on."

I went to the Apple Store and I think I have it figured out! In your camera settings, formats, you will automatically have High Efficiency selected under camera capture. Apparently it is using many different cameras at once and putting all of the images together to “get the best image” but it sucks. So check Most Compatible instead. It seems to be a lot clearer with that selection. Try it and tell me if you think it helps! We did a side by side comparison in the Apple Store using both settings and the latter came out better!

Same problem here! The iPhone 15 Pro Max's camera doesn't give the expected result. The image has a terrible quality, the photo is grainy, it costs too much to focus the lenses correctly. It is impossible to take photos of documents in which all the text is clearly, blurs the edges of the text and is only sharp in the center. It's really annoying and problematic the issue of the focus and the graininess of the photo, I come from an iPhone X that takes photos with better sharpness quality than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. For me the camera is indispensable and I'm having a very bad experience.

Selfies aren't good either, the photo shown in the preview is beautiful and once you take it, it changes to grayish tones and starts to look grainy as well.

Please solve this situation, it is very worrying. I've read that it's a general problem of several users and it's terrifying to think that it's hardware issues. I updated to the latest iOS 17.2.1 but it doesn't solve anything!

The allegations that you were apparently told are nonsense.

The display has nothing to do with how bright a photo is; if you want your photos to look brighter, you can turn up your display brightness yourself, but that would give you a false impression of what your photo actually looks like.

The brightness setting on demonstration iPhones is no different than that on whichever iPhone you purchase; if you prefer the way the demo iPhones look you can set the brightness on your iPhone to the same level.

Further, there are not multiple manufacturers of the camera chip in iPhones; the iPhone 14 and 15 both use a camera sensor manufactured by a third party; you can read more by doing a simple Internet search.

Same here, my 11 pro takes better pictures…

Yes!! Like I tried to record the beginning of the Halloween movie and the video is so ugly with its grainy graphics and hazy output.

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.