should my iphone xs max camera look blurry?

Hello. I have an update. I’m calling this solved, at least for me. While I said previously playing with the settings helped the issue, my problem never went away. All pics are grainy and sometimes with lens flare. It’s much worse and move obvious in low light pics but the issue is in ALL pics. After going through every troubleshooting possibility (software updates, cleaning the lens, clearing cache, using other camera apps, etc.  nothing made my pics look as fantastic as everyone else on the web was claiming. How could a camera touted as the best ever look so awful in all my pics?  So I finally threw in the towel and took my phone to the Apple Store. In advance, I took many pics in many lighting situations to show examples. They ran diagnostics and said “it passed the tests just fine.”  I said just look at my pics. They agreed they look bad. But what happened next was the definitive proof. They took pics with the store camera and my camera. Side by side. It was immediately obvious that all of my pics are worse. The conclusion: a hardware defect. Thankfully i have Apple Care. They gave me a new phone. Guess what?  No issues!!!  It looks and works perfectly. The pics are beautiful. So if you are still making yourself crazy like I did. My advice is to stop the troubleshooting and take it to Apple. Cheers and good luck. I hope this helps. 

Not sure why but you could try the following: In Settings>Messages ensure the low quality image mode is off. In Settings>Camera>Formats change the camera capture format to Most Compatible.

Had anyone got this sorted? I had a genius appointment, today and he said he couldn't do anything. He acknowledged that it's basically a water colour painting, once you zoom in just a little bit, but it's apparently a feature, not a bug.

(I Did two post on this issue before) So i have the same problem also with the Front and Rear cameras on my Xs Max running 12.1.2.

I Got the rear camera replaced, didn't help. So i took the phone back and got the hole unit replaced (new iphone), but STILL the same blurry, static, grained pictures on front/rear cameras.

Apple support says they can't / don't know what to do and that theres no other repport on this? well they obviously didn't read there own Communities and all the posts that u guys have published about the exact same issue.

Nope. You can’t fix this problem. The camera on the new iPhone versions are just like that and you can’t do anything about it. I sold my XS Max and bought the 8 Plus product red and the camera is 10000x better ;)

Yes they should do a comparison. Honestly they were winging it with me. They didn’t have a checklist of what to do to address my issue. They said it was a “new one” for them. That is also why I am sharing my experience to help others. So yes I recommend them doing a comparison. And to answer your other question, ALL of my pics have the issue and I think it was bad advice them telling you to stick with a mode that looks acceptable. All modes should look perfect!

Mine is set to jpeg. While that might make a relative difference, it doesn't change that this is just an aggressively software 'optimized' camera.

I wish I never bought this phone.

Be sure to zoom in on details to see the graininess. And yes, even though I have Apple care, that shouldn’t matter. Everyone here with XS Max should still be under the 1 year warranty.

So my front facing camera and rear camera are terrible on my iphone xs max 256GB... Even after the IOS 12.1 update i'm still having these issues. Here are some pictures that i took with my xs max and my old iphone 7 plus. The difference between both phones is HUGE!! Did i pay over 1400 dollars for this?????!!!!!! Also if i take pictures with apps like snapchat or instagram it's just worse than the normal camera app on my iphone.

I haven't here. I guess until Apple decide it can fix it with software its not going to go anywhere. Apple hasn't even acknowledged there is an issue with it as far as I know. I mean they are saying nothing is wrong with their bent tablets I don't think they are going to admit anything is wrong with the camera they swear is better than the last one.

I just went back and checked the photos from my iPhone 7+ (which I wish I still had) and they were better. How can this be? Lots of light, low light, it doesn't matter. Overall, my old iPhone blows this newer more expensive one out of the water.

The photos look like an impressionist watercolour painting and Apple won't do a thing.

This isn't solved. Period.

just checked my setting per your suggestion and it was already on most compatible and my pics suck! With the blurry painting type effect. I changed to the other setting and will test in the morning to see if I can see a difference. I’m a professional photographer and have been complaining about this for months. Nice to see it’s not my imagination. This needs to be address by Apple. I’m beyond ******!

My friend just took photos with her X and blew my XS Max photos away. Why would Apple downgrade photo quality on a more expensive and newer phone??

And as far as the settings, that was the first thing I did when I saw my photo quality was not good. I changed the compression. Made very little difference.

Again, why are they not addressing this issue?? Ignore it and it will go away since we are just a handful of people complaining? Probably. But there has to be more of us that just hasn’t found this forum. I don’t know how anyone could be happy with photo quality unless they came from a flip phone.

That makes sense. Here is a side by side comparison of my IPhone XR and my husband’s XR. I checked and both phones had all the same settings on the camera and both phones screen brightness all the way up. Mine is on left and husband’s on right. Especially look at the ceiling. And the pic was taken with my son’s 6s and his even looks better at the top where the ceiling is!! I also sent the two pics actually taken on each iPhone XR.

So your advice would be to ask them to take pics with store camera and your phone camera? When I took mine in they only ran hardware tests which were fine and then only took pics with the portrait mode. The portrait mode on my phone looks fine....it is the regular camera mode that has grainy pics. So the guy said just take pics with portrait mode. Was your portrait mode grainy as well?