iPhone 7 Plus Camera - Pictures are bad

Something I noticed in the Dpreview article was the out of focus areas in their pictures look an awful lot like my issue im having. I just wonder if it is a focusing issue?

i can also reproduce the problem and think i know WHY it is happening... but not how to fix it.

on my 7 plus it only happens in 2x lens mode using Apple's Camera App... when taking the same picture with a 3rd party app at 2x lens mode i noticed that the JPG produced with the Apple Camera App is ⅔ to 1/2 the file size (not pixel size... but size in MB) of the JPG produced with any 3rd party app.

I think for some reason the Apple Camera app is compressing the image too severely.

this is completely repeatable.

**UPDATE**

looking at my 7+ pictures from iOS v10.0.1 they do NOT seem to suffer from this issue and are "normal" in file size.

Myself as well as my wife are also having this issue. Hopefully Apple will take our complaints seriously and fix these issues soon.

I noticed bad photo quality when moving from Nexus 5X phone to iPhone 6s and now to iPhone 7. Look at the image below and guess which is nexus and which is iphone 7. I took these photos at the same moment with the same lighting and conditions. What you see is a 100% zoom.

I had the same problem with iphone 6s and now 7 so I guess this is a software problem or their choice to do it this way. Photos are compressed, oversaturated and with exagerrated noise-reduction which kills all the details.

I noticed the effect is super obvious on skin.

The heavy noise reduction basically destroys any chance of capturing a great photo from the Camera app.

The only mode I shoot on the default Camera app is Portrait Mode which is amazing, everything else is just garbage at this moment. iOS 10.2 Beta 2 should drop today or tomorrow, I'll take some samples to compare to RAW once it is released to see if they've done anything to this reported bug/issue.

I doubt they will fix that. I have seen some conversation about this issue way back in 2014 about the compression and noise reduction. There are millions of people who do not see that. I tried to show it to my brother and he just thinks photos are good enough. People who notice that are a small group of enthusiasts who just see those things 😉 I hope I am wrong 😉

I am thinking myself of moving back to nexus phone or new pixel. Good photo quality is too important to me ...

Thought of doing the same but I'm too integrated in iOS at this point. Besides I can by-pass this issue by shooting RAW but I'm still hopeful they will fix it soon.

yea man. side by side comparison with my nexus 6p, all the photos turns out better with nexus 6p

For now I tested that the lightroom RAW saves JPG to camera roll and they are around 3 to 3.5 MB and when compared to 900kb photo from stock camera app they are exactly what I want. I just would rather use the system app and not lightroom. For now...#sigh

I'm wondering if it is hardware or software, or the way any camera app software is written to work with the new phone. As posted previously, was not an issue on an older iPhone 5s, but here are new test photos using the iPhone camera app and an app called Camera+ with about the same results.

FYI, Apple called me Saturday afternoon and I provided other test photos, so they are looking into this.

Since there is a way how to get flawless photos I don't think it is hardware related.

If it is not hardware issue, this issue should be seen in every iPhone 7 plus. I don't think the reviewers would have missed this if it is this obvious.

I think it heavily depends on lighting conditons. For example in broad daylight it is not so obvious and harder to spot.

Please also note, that it is not entirely related only to iPhone 7 Plus, I am observing the same behaviour on classic iPhone 7 (non-plus) like others in this thread.