I have an old Samsung Note 8; I was contemplating Iphone 13 Pro for my wife so we can improve the casual/random photos of our kids, but that'd be a deal breaker :-<
[context - we have Nikon d800, d7200, couple of d90's, V1, etc lying around the house so we do like photos, and being able to zoom or choose a lens is something we take for granted :]
It has always done this to some extent, but as the other link I posted ([1]) describes, this both happens more frequently with the 3x lens on the 13 Pro than the 2x lens on previous generations because the 3x zoom has a smaller aperture than the 2x, and also the effect is more noticeable, because it's blowing a 1x image up to 3x rather than 2x.
I hope Apple will offer some facility to tweak this in future as it seems to me it frequently chooses digital zoom rather than the zoom lens even in "not that challenging" conditions. I do get why they'd do this though – the reality is that if it always used the zoom lens, you'd end up with a lot more noisy/blurred photos due to physics – but it would be nice to say "I'm OK with that"!
One other thing I should mention is that you can't set a third party camera app as the default, so the camera button on the lock screen always opens the stock camera. In practice I don't find this a huge issue, as if I'm grabbing a quick snapshot from the lock screen it might be of some fleeting moment, in which case I'd probably rather get a usable digitally zoomed image, than a blurry optical zoom one.
[1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...
It's the auto-macro functionality in the camera settings. The default behavior switches to the ultra-wide below the minimum focus distance of the other two cameras.
It’s just as convenient for quick sharing, and the photos are so much better.
Search for OpenMemories Framework, there's something of an unofficial SDK available.
Phones make this process seamless because the designers realized that the key to a good photo experience is the human experience of sharing.
Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the "painterly" look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]).
I understand why the software makes these choices for the "average" user, but it would be nice to enable a "pro" mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations.
I ended up using the stock camera app for "snapshots" (e.g. photos where I didn't care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile's camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom's UX is clunkier).
This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it's great for "capturing the moment", while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it's usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera.
The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there's more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I'm sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp.
This was a long way of saying that if you're frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you'll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone's great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots!
[1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...