The iPhone May Soon Get a 200MP Camera
While Apple is one of the last companies to focus on megapixel counts, it has been upping its game over the past few years by moving to 48-megapixel sensors. However, a new rumor suggests it may be preparing for an even bigger jump that could bring it in line with the camera specs on top-end Android flagships like Samsung’s Galaxy Ultra series.
According to a Weibo post from leaker Digital Chat Station, Apple is testing a 200-megapixel camera. While the account has a reasonable track record for accuracy, this one is also a reasonably safe prediction as it doesn’t say when the higher-resolution camera will arrive.
In fact, the post says almost nothing other than that Apple is currently testing it. If that’s accurate, it does suggest it plans to use the camera sooner rather than later since it rarely tests new technologies more than three or four years in advance, but it’s also a pretty safe bet that we won’t see this in the iPhone 17, which is already in the final phases of production testing. We wouldn’t put money on it arriving in next year’s iPhone 18 lineup, either.
When (and if) it does arrive, it would almost certainly be used for the main camera, rivaling the 200 MP shooter that Samsung introduced in the Galaxy S23 Ultra in February 2023 and has been included in both subsequent models. This is the main camera, and it originally sat alongside a 12 MP ultrawide and a pair of 10 MP telephoto lenses with 3x and 10x zoom factors.
Samsung later bumped the primary telephoto lens to 50 MP but dropped the optical zoom to 5x, relying on the higher-resolution sensor to provide a virtual 10x zoom through pixel cropping — a technique Apple introduced in the 2022 iPhone 14 Pro.
Apple has followed a similar strategy for increasing camera resolutions in recent years. After sticking with a 12 MP resolution from the 2015 iPhone 6s through to the entire iPhone 13 family, the iPhone 14 Pro gained a 48 MP sensor. This still shot 12 MP photos by default, but the higher resolution provided more data for the computational photography engine, plus a virtual 2x optical-quality zoom accomplished by capturing the middle 12 million pixels.
That sensor came to the entire iPhone 15 family, but the other cameras remained at 12 MP until the iPhone 16 Pro upped the Ultra Wide to 48 MP. If rumors are accurate, the iPhone 17 Pro will complete the set by adopting a 48 MP sensor on the telephoto. This could also lead to a 10x virtual zoom on those models, much like Samsung’s Galaxy Ultra phones now perform with their 50 MP sensor.
There are also reports that the front-facing camera may get a boost to 24 MP this year, marking the first increase since the iPhone 11 swapped out the 7 MP TrueDepth camera for the current 12 MP resolution.
It’s unlikely that Apple’s eventual move to a 200 MP camera would be primarily for shooting higher-resolution photos. Even with a 48 MP sensor, current iPhone models only default to 24 MP images. Few people need to take everyday pictures at 200 megapixels, not to mention the additional storage requirements. However, as with the 48 MP sensors, more pixels means more data for Apple’s photographic algorithms to work with. Plus, pixel cropping could also support even higher virtual zoom factors without degrading quality; a 200 MP sensor can capture a 50 MP 2x image, a 22 MP 3x image, or a 12.5 MP 4x image.
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