Throughout our photo expedition we shot the same subjects with both Dan's iPhone 6S Plus and our own 6 Plus. At first glance it was quite hard to tell the two sets of images apart – Apple has kept the exposure levels, colours and tonal rendition exactly the same, which is a good technical achievement considering that the camera is new. If you're completely tuned into the way an iPhone camera works, the one in the 6S will deliver exactly the results you're used to.
But closer inspection of the images revealed some interesting differences, and we've already mentioned this in earlier sections. Apple has changed not only the sensor resolution but also the image processing and, regrettably, it's done what a lot of camera makers do – it's gone for heavier noise reduction and increased sharpening.
The new camera can resolve certain types of detail better than the old one. Anything which hard, clear edges, such as lettering or signs, is rendered more clearly. But it can't quite record fine, subtle textures as well as the old 8-megapixel iSight camera. This becomes more obvious at higher ISO settings, where the old camera shows more noise but also more detail. The new 12-megapixel camera has the noise smoothed out but, as is usually the case with noise reduction, some of the fine textural detail goes with it.
Check out our comparisons below to see what we mean.
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