Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- An analyst has revealed more clear details about Apple’s upcoming periscope camera.
- The iPhone maker will reportedly use a 12MP 5x or 6x periscope shooter.
- The new camera is believed to debut in 2023.
We heard rumors more than a year since Apple has been working on bringing periscope cameras to its iPhone lineup, with suggestions that this technology could come to the iPhone 15 series by 2023. Now a trusted source has shed more light on the hardware you can expect.
Veteran Apple watcher and TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo published a message on Medium, looking at Apple’s camera supply chain for future iPhones. The analyst also added that a periscope camera will be coming specifically to Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max models.
So what will this camera be capable of? Well, Kuo claims that Apple will use a 12MP (1/3-inch, f/2.8, sensor-shift stabilization) camera with 5x or 6x optical zoom. In other words, it doesn’t offer the same native zoom level as the Galaxy S22 Ultra‘s 10MP 10x periscope camera.
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Nevertheless, phones like the Pixel 6 Pro have combined a 48MP 4x periscope camera with hybrid zoom techniques to deliver usable results up to 10x or 20x. Even the Galaxy S22 Ultra uses hybrid zoom to provide decent images at 20x or 30x. So it’s obvious that Apple will take this hybrid approach for images greater than 5x or 6x.
However, this will be a highly anticipated addition to the iPhone series as periscope cameras first debuted on the Huawei P30 Pro and Oppo Reno 10x Zoom Edition in 2019.