iPhone 16 Pro series review in progress: Searching for the perfect shots

I’ve been waiting for years to tackle a Pro iPhone review, and I couldn’t have gotten the opportunity at a better time. All of this year’s iPhone 16 models have a ton of camera enhancements under the surface, and as MobileSyrup’s resident photographer, I’ve been having a blast testing out these new phones.

The all-new Camera Control button champions these photo upgrades, and while it’s so much more than a button, the new Photonic Engine has been my favourite new feature. It offers a lot of versatility when you’re editing photos and works harder to give users more control over skin tones. There are even a bunch of bespoke new image presets that are super fun to use, and this year, they aren’t baked into your pictures forever. Combining this with last year’s automatic Portrait mode feature gives you more flexibility to stylize your photos after taking them and allows you to change them in days, or even years after you’ve shot them.

Alongside the camera upgrades, there are some really nice quality-of-life improvements too. Each iPhone 16 Pro has a bigger battery than the previous generation, a stronger screen, and enough horsepower to support the upcoming Apple Intelligence features and the company’s AAA gaming ambitions. That means 8GB of RAM and the new A18 Pro chipset that benchmarks surprisingly close to the M1 desktop chip from a few years ago. There has also been a redesigned thermal management system allowing the phones to game or record high-end video for an absurd amount of time without overheating. Side note: This review is pretty camera-focused since that’s where I found the most improvements. If you’re not into that stuff, you can skip down about two-thirds of the review to get to the basic phone improvements.

Numerous upgrades are also available for video shooters, including a few new software audio enhancements paired with studio-quality microphones on the phones themselves. This ensures that whether you’re filming a selfie video on a windy beach or a short film, the iPhone 16 Pro is versatile enough for both situations and quite a few in between.

That all being said, the MobileSyrup iPhone reviews will be a bit different this year as I add to it over the next few weeks once I get to test every aspect of the phones thoroughly, ending with the suite of Apple Intelligence features that are set to arrive over the next few months and into next year. iOS 18.1 will come in October with AI writing tools, Notifications/Mail summaries, and the ability to edit people out of photos. Rumours suggest that another wave will come in December with Genmoji and ChatGPT’s integration into Siri. And the new AI-capable Siri will likely arrive sometime after that.

The new Desert Titanium colour is stunning.

After my 16 Pro review units arrived, I spent my first days with the 16 Pro Max while my girlfriend Alex hoisted the 16 Pro. We tested some general features and the cameras by touring around Toronto. We walked almost 100km last week on these adventures, shooting around 3,000 photos across the iPhone 16 Pro series and the regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. You can find my iPhone 16 review in progress on our website later this week, and it’s safe to say both of us love Camera control and the new photography enhancements on both phones. We’ve shot a ton of videos too, but I haven’t had time to edit them into a YouTube review just yet. Keep your eyes peeled for the first update to these reviews coming later this week (or early next week), when I put together my video, fully shot on an iPhone to test all the new video features.

For now, let’s jump into the new photography enhancements.

Camera control makes you the fastest photographer in the west

First and foremost, you can’t pick up a new iPhone this year without touching the new Camera Control area. It’s a combination of a button and a narrow trackpad on the right side of the phone that’s placed to be easily hit with your thumb or index finger, depending on how you’re holding the phone. There are three ways to interact with the button – ‘swiping,’ ‘clicking’ it down, and ‘pressing’ on the sensor with a bit of pressure, but not enough to make it click.

If your phone is asleep, a single press simply awakens your device like the power/Siri button, a quick double press launches the camera, like the shortcut built into the power button on most Android devices. Honestly, it’s not something I thought would happen, but since phones are so large now, being able to unlock my phone with the lower placement of the Camera control has been the main way I unlock the iPhone 16 Pro Max. This has been great for being able to trigger the camera before I even get the phone in front of my eyes, and once open, a soft press pulls up the new Camera control menu, letting you then swipe through a variety of options depending on what app you’re using. In the iOS camera app, you can choose between Zoom, Exposure, Depth blur, Cameras, Styles and Tones.

Any photographer can agree that the faster you can get your camera out, the less likely you are to miss shots. In a photojournalism workshop in college, the teacher walked in one day with a sick orange hat in hand and said, “The first person to take a photo of me wins this hat,” and before they could finish, I had snapped a picture because I knew how to use the lock screen camera shortcut on my (then new) iPhone 7 Plus. I’ve been thinking about that a lot with this new Camera Control scheme, and I’m happy to know that in a quick draw against an Android phone, the iPhone can compete, and it will all come down to the user holding the camera and not the platform they use.

Having said that, there is a decent learning curve with the new button/touchpad-area, and it takes some practice to get used to all its nuances. Clicking to open the camera and then clicking again to take a photo is easy, but getting used to the more subtle presses and swipes to open and navigate the sub-menu takes a bit more time. It’s definitely been interesting to fight against my own muscle memory this past week to adjust the exposure or zoom through the button instead of the screen, however, the more Alex and I use the camera system, the more natural and intuitive it feels. The beauty of it is that you can use it however you want: by taking advantage of all its functionality or by using a few features. Alex, for example, has loved using the quick video recording, while I’ve found myself mainly using the Zoom and Styles functionality.

When we first got our hands on the phones, we thought that the button was in the wrong place. Alex wanted it lower, and I wanted it higher because of our different hand sizes, which led us to the same realization: it’s already in the right place.

Styles have been the star of the show for me, with six ‘undertones’ to help you dial in the perfect skin tones without adjusting the overall look of the photo substantially, and nine ‘moods’ which are more stylized looks like ‘Vivid,’ two Black and White filters, a warm ‘Cozy’ look and more. The real jaw-dropper so far is the Ansel Adams-inspired ‘Stark Black & White’ for its sharp contrast with deep blacks and crisp white highlights. While I’ve shot Black & White film a few times, growing up in a digital world with increasingly rich and colourful screens, I’ve never found myself drawn to it, but the new iPhone 16 Photonic Engine has finally unlocked its potential for me since I don’t have to be afraid of wanting a colourful shot later. If I do, I can edit the picture again to bring it back to whatever I want.

When Photographic Styles launched on the iPhone 13 series, I was always a little hesitant to stray from Apple’s baseline processing because I often compare phone cameras to each other for work, and it felt like the default camera in the past gave me the most flexibility when editing. That’s all changed with the new Styles that can be edited and swapped out in the Photos app on iPhone, so my old worries are gone, and it’s incredibly freeing. If I want to shoot an event in black and white or with a film-inspired mood, I can, and I don’t have to worry about someone asking me for a colourful edit later down the line. The iPhone 16 series covers all my bases right out of the box.

Beyond that, by day two with the iPhones, the ‘Amber’ Undertone became my new default shooting mode for pictures outside and ‘Rose gold’ worked the best for pictures of me since it kept a little magenta in my skin tone. Amber has some warmth pumped in, and I’ve found it really brings beautiful, subtle, warm tones in browns, greens and reds without looking too yellow. It’s been perfect for making these hot early September days feel like a summer memory. If you dive into the iOS Settings app and navigate to the camera section, you can set your default style and the intensity you want it to be.

The Tone slider within styles also does a lot to help you get more shadows in your image for photos with more contrast and less of a flat HDR effect. If you used the ‘Rich Contrast’ Photographic style on the iPhone 13/14/15 series, this little control lets you dial in that look with a lot more precision and power. Before the iPhone 16 series came out, I was shooting a lot with the Halide camera app to use its fun ‘Process Zero’ mode to help me get images with more contrast and less HDR flatness. The new Tone control doesn’t do exactly the same thing as Process Zero, but it does finally let me move away from that default iPhone computational photography look, which makes me super happy.

I have a ProRaw version of this bird photo in the sample gallery below that looks so good I might blow it up for my wall.

It would have been great for Apple to apply some haptics to the Camera Control’s zoom features, especially since it can move at varying speeds and with momentum. Having fine-grained vibrations to let you know your zooming would probably be helpful since the icons are pretty small. I also wish the zoom icon in the camera control menu was a telescope or binoculars instead of the current design, which is a crosshair. It just doesn’t scream “Zoom controls” to me. There are some options to customize the button in the Camera settings. All you can do right now is switch the quick launch action from a single to a double press or set it to open a third-party camera like Halide.

My only real problem with Camera Control is that I wish there were a way to reverse the scrolling direction. The way it works now is the opposite of my actual camera zoom lens. Therefore, my brain always wants to push my finger along the button to zoom out and pull it to zoom in, but in the current iteration, it’s the opposite. It’s a small thing, and I’ve already gotten more comfortable with it over the past week, but the option would be nice and I expect all photographers would be thankful for the added personalization.

When you’re re-editing your photos (or right in the camera viewfinder), you can pull up a new grid matrix styles editor to dial in your look. This lets you very quickly and intuitively control saturation, tone, and the colour palette. Moving the control dot left and right sways the colours. Up and down does the Tone, and a slider below the grid does the Palette, which applies how strongly the style is on your photo. Not only does this grid method work really well, but it’s also quite simple to use and has subtle haptic feedback to help you control your image exactly as you want. When doing this, you’ll notice a bubble at the top of the screen showing you exactly what you’re changing, making it easy to apply similar effects to your other images or reset it back to the default it was shot at.

Since iOS 17.5, you’ve been able to copy and paste edits made in the Photos app. You can do the same with the new Photographic Styles, making them more like traditional filters. However, they’re a lot more robust than something you’d typically call a filter and line up more with the camera image profiles you might find baked into a pro camera like the Fujifilm X-H2S I use for work or Adobe’s Lightroom camera profiles for RAW images. If you’re a fan of Apple’s existing photo filters, don’t worry; those are still here, but the Photographic Styles from the iPhone 13/14/15 have been scrapped and re-done. Even though there is a ‘Vivid’ style on both the new and old iPhones, the new one is much more stylized, whereas the old one is closer to one of the new undertones.

When you see the live photo version of this macro shot, it becomes even more impressive. The new iPhone cameras are extremely fast.

Regardless of which undertone you choose, it should help you dial in a look that compliments your skin. This has been something Google has used to market Pixel phones for years, and the Pixel camera is really good, but I appreciate how Apple has given more control and choice to iPhone users. I can dial my photos in and ensure my subjects look their best regardless of the lighting and skin tones and I don’t have to rely on an algorithm like I do with a Pixel. In practice, these undertones do slightly change the colour science of each frame, and not just the skin tones, but the skin tones are the focus, and as I mentioned above, I’ve been using the Amber undertone as a subtle filter for all my photos to add a bit of warmth to them, but Rose Gold also pushes the magenta values which take my pale skin from looking waxy, and depending on your skin and your preferences you could use two completely different options and be just as satisfied as I am.

Other hardware improvements on the iPhone 16 Pro include adding the 5x zoom lens (120mm equivalent) that was exclusive to the 15 Pro Max last year. This is my first iPhone with 5x since I used a regular 15 Pro last year, and it’s been a treat to get crispy zoom shots over great distances this year. The lens compression of 5x really helps the small camera punch above its weight class since you can get a little more natural blur in the background and foreground with this focal length. I also like it better when both pro iPhones are aligned since it’s annoying having to get the large phone for a better camera. This lens only clocks in at 12 megapixels, but it’s tuned extraordinarily well, and it absolutely surprised me with how outstanding images can be out of it. Shooting in RAW Max takes this up another level, even in low light, which blew my mind.

All the Photos samples in my review have been edited using the iOS Photos app this year. That said, I used Lightroom mobile for a few key edits, such as dust removal in the first picture above. 

This might be the lowest resolution of the trio of lenses on the back of the iPhone 16 Pro series, but you’d never know it. Even foliage isn’t oversharpened and holds up to more cropping than you’d expect. The good thing about Apple not changing this lens’s sensor this year is that it’s had more time to refine it, and in my testing, that’s paid off considerably.

This year, the Ultrawide sensor was upgraded to a new 48-megapixel sensor, which has been a delight to use and works much better in low light than previous iPhones. The focal length on this one is equivalent to a 13mm full-frame lens, and Apple’s implementation is way more pro than it needs to be. There’s minimal barrel distortion and really sharp details, even in dim settings. In the dark, it does struggle a bit more than the other lenses, but I’m going to keep testing it and see what I can get out of it over the next few weeks. I always struggle to find good compositions for Ultrawides, and because I find the default 24mm normal to be plenty wide, I haven’t switched to it as much as I should have.

While this shot isn’t perfect, the larger 48-megapixel ultra-wide sensor really shocked me with this photo. Night mode was enabled and held for 3 seconds.

UPDATE Sept 25: After a week of testing the Ultrawide more, I’ve actually been able to test the lens more, but I still have trouble finding compositions that warrant that wide. That said, I’ve actually been able to take a night shot that really impressed me, and it was in the woods, so the detail the small sensor kept in the leaves really surprised me. Turning on the 48-megapixel RAW mode also really helped the images retain a lot more detail than the default mode. That said, I’ve been able to crop in a lot more than last year, which helps me shoot wide, crop into what I want, and retain details.  Beyond that, I do use the Ultrawide a bit more for video and the increased megapixel count helps a lot there.

That said, there is one Ultrawide feature I got a ton of use this year: the upgraded macro mode. The new 48-megapixel Ultrawide unlocks fantastic macro photography on iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. It’s seriously impressive, and I’ve been hunting bugs all weekend to try and test the mode with cool subjects. After coming off the impressive 48-megapixel Macro on the Pixel 9 (not the Pro), I was super eager to test out Apple’s version, and my first attempt fell flat… But that was from user error. I was used to holding other phones with macro mode around 30-40mm from a subject, and the iPhone shines super close up as low as 15mm, which might not sound like a lot of difference, but at this scale, it was a huge leap for me, and my photography.

Because the focus plane of the macro mode is so shallow, you need to make sure your camera is insanely close to your subject, and you’re tapping to get the focus you want. It can be difficult to do when your camera is shoved in a bee’s face on a flower blowing in the wind, but once I figured it out, no bug was safe from my giant camera giving them their covergirl moments. This also highlighted how fast the iPhone 16 Pro camera can be. I noticed barely any shutter lag as I was jamming the camera control ten times in a row and praying the wind would die down.

Because this macro lens is 48-megapixel this year, you can crop these shots in enough to make great phone wallpapers. This has quickly become one of my favourite cameras to play with on the iPhone 16 Pro series.

Since you can get so close, it almost feels like you’re looking at plants and bugs at their level. It’s just cool to see these tiny things blown up through the power of your iPhone. As you can see on the bee above, there is an incredible amount of detail on its face, and you can even see flecks of pollen in its hair and on its legs. The crisp detail on the wings is also mind-boggling, but as you can see from the left legs being blurry, the focus plane is incredibly shallow, so I’d recommend just going wild and shooting a ton of shots, especially if the subject is moving. Thankfully, the iPhone camera is backed by the extraordinarily powerful A18 chip, so as long as you keep pushing down on the Camera Control button, the phone will keep up.

The main lens is pretty similar to the iPhone 15 and 14 Pros, but Apple has updated the sensor this year to work better with its new chip for zero shutter lag even when taking ProRaw images, which is the biggest form of camera capture on the Pro iPhones. Overall, this camera is still great, and my favourite feature is actually the Fusion Camera system for simply allowing me to dive into the camera settings and set my default photo lens to be equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full-frame camera. This feature is already on the iPhone 15 Pro, but it’s really nice, and as I mentioned above, I find the default 24mm option pretty wide. It’s a good social focal length, but I like the tighter focus 35mm offers for my shooting style. You can also set the Fusion camera to 28mm, but I haven’t spent much time with that one because I’m just so satisfied with 35mm.

Video features

I swear this parrot said hello to me when I walked into its room, but Alex doesn’t believe me, and once the camera was out, it didn’t make another sound.

This year, all the iPhone 16 series phones include new studio-quality spatial audio microphones, and they have some cool voice isolation tech that’s on by default that helps your video sound better if you’re recording in a loud space. There’s also a new feature called Audio Mix that lets you manually apply audio processing to your videos in three different ways. I’ve only run one test with this, and so far, it’s pretty cool and seems to work as advertised, but I’ll have more thoughts in my first review update once I’m done editing my #shotoniPhone16 video review.

One thing that’s been incredibly handy for shooting the content we’ve gotten so far is the ability to shoot 4K HDR and 4K Apple LOG in 4K 120 frames per second. If you want to shoot LOG at this high frame rate, you must have an external SSD attached. But even the standard 120 fps video in Dolby Vision HDR is incredible and lets you get amazing slow-motion footage. You can even adjust the playback frames per second in the iPhone camera app, giving you a lot of control over the footage without exporting it to Final Cut Pro on Mac or Capcut on mobile. The sample below is 4K slowed down to various speeds, but because editing HDR footage is tough to match with my mirrorless camera, I always turn HDR video off on my iPhones, so this sample isn’t in Dolby Vision and is instead in rec.709 SDR.

Regardless, being able to shoot actual 120 and 60fps video natively in the camera app without switching to a dedicated slow-motion mode is a blessing for content creators. For instance, whenever I cover an event like the iPhone launch, I just run around with my camera on a gimbal running at 4K 60fps so that I can slow each shot down by 50 percent to make sure that I can stretch my b-roll as long as possible, even if I’m only able to grab short clips. This also allows me to pull screenshots from the footage that usually looks pretty decent. You may not have realized it yet, but all the shots of me walking around holding the iPhone in the collages above are screenshots pulled from 60fps iPhone 16 Pro footage Alex shot for this review’s upcoming video portion.

Ok, we get it. The cameras are great; what about the rest of the damn phone?

Good news! This year’s package is fantastic overall, even if the most enticing upgrades for me are in the camera department.

The first thing you’ll notice when picking up the iPhone 16 Pro or 16 Pro Max is the impressive screen with its silky smooth 120fps refresh rate and super minimal screen borders. While I’m not on team “every device needs a 120hz screen,” I appreciate it when I have it, and the iPhone screen is tuned to perfection. Scrolling around the operating system feels great, and watching movies with 120fps action scenes (pretty much only Avatar 2, lol — James Cameron is crazy for that one) is great. Combined with the excellent HDR enabled by the phone’s 2,000 nits of maximum brightness, the colour and light reproduction is fabulous. Obviously, I’m not advocating for watching Avatar 2 on your iPhone, but it’s a great test for both the screen and the built-in speakers, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max, especially with its larger display, passed with perfectly saturated colours.

The speakers themselves are super loud this year and offer a robust sound stage with spatial audio. You’ll want the phone centred in front of you to get the most out of that 3D audio effect, but for music and podcasts, I’d call it room-filling for maybe the first time ever. Not that the 15 Pro was bad. I used the phone as a speaker hundreds of times, but there’s a little more bass in the new device that really helps it feel more robust and balanced compared to last year’s Pro iPhone. I’ve been using phone speakers more and more over the past few years, and I never really expected my phone to Sherlock my Bluetooth speakers, but it’s happening, and this year continues to push that needle forward.

While Alex and I have only lived with these iPhones for a short time, during that time, we pushed the batteries to their absolute limits, shooting a ton of photos and videos. I’ll have more to share after a few more weeks with the phones, but compared to my 15 Pro (92% battery capacity left) and the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, the Pros are great, especially the Pro Max. On our first five-hour photo adventure, both phones lasted the whole time, and we didn’t even need to charge when we got home. It was really impressive compared to the next day of testing the 16 and 16 Plus, which needed a portable battery to top up mid-day. It made me confident that if I were buying an iPhone for content creation, not only would the cameras be better on the Pros, but the battery could get you through long shoot days more effectively.

The Shortcuts app is fairly complex for most, but it’s worth learning if you want to get the most out of the Action Button.

The new A18 Pro chip is a powerhouse. When I ran it through Geekbench, it got a CPU single-core score of 3325 and a multi-core score of 8030. The M1 MacBook Air hits 2342 (single-core) and 8350 (multi-core), and the 15 Pro hits 2883 (sc) and 7174 (mc). I haven’t gotten time to fully test the upgraded AAA gaming capabilities, but in my brief test of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the 16 Pro seemed smoother than my 15 Pro. With benchmark scores like these, I anticipate it to be much better than last year’s phones for gaming or CPU/GPU-intensive tasks.

That said, a new thermal management system this year helps your phone run at its peak performance for longer, resulting in more consistent gaming experiences over long periods. This new thermal management system should also help with the longevity of the phone’s battery. According to an iFixit report from earlier this year, wireless charging generates a ton of heat and can degrade your battery faster by making it heat up more. With this new system, you should be able to wirelessly charge without having to worry as much about it degrading your battery over the long term.

The new screens are supposed to be more scratch and crack-resistant this year, but I’m not willing to take a hardness pick to my phone or drop it, so you’re better off waiting for a review from Consumer Reports or JerryRigEverything if you want to see someone pull a knife on the new screens. What I was able to test was the waterproofing. I’ve made it a habit of dunking my phones into the koi pond near my house to take underwater pictures of the fish for my camera samples, and the Pro Max is still kicking. There was some water in the top speaker that took a bit to dry out, but a quick speed run through the Avatar 2 fight scenes at max volume helped shake the water loose, and it’s been normal since then.

I’ve heard about AI updates, are they good?

The iPhone 16 series (and the 15 Pro) are Apple’s only phones that will get support for Apple Intelligence so far, but they ship with iOS 18, which is AI-free at the time of writing. While I have played around with a few of the available features on the beta track on my old iPhone, I’ll wait until they’re officially released before sharing anything in a review capacity.

My experience

As a content creator and a photographer, I feel these new iPhones are tailor-made for me. I’ve seen people online saying that it’s not a huge upgrade from the 14 Pro, which sure, the 14 Pro is an amazing phone and offered a nice jump up in camera quality at the time and still has very capable photography optics.

However, it’s still missing much of the pro software and video support that Apple has added over the past two generations. Things like LOG, Audio Mix, the Fusion camera and Camera Controls are game chargers for creators. I never want to use an iPhone without dedicated camera buttons again. Even for capturing behind-the-scenes footage, the iPhone 16 proves to be worth the upgrade. The fact that I can take it out of my pocket and have the camera not only open, but shooting video without having to move my hand from how I’d naturally hold the phone is a literal godsend that Alex and I can’t stop gushing to each other about.

If you don’t shoot a lot of content, improvements like the long battery life and more durable construction are still enticing if it’s time for you to upgrade. But really, I’d expect most people getting this phone to come from older Pro iPhones from the 11/12 series and maybe even the 13, although the 13 Pro still holds up pretty well.

Stay tuned for more from me on all things iPhones 16 Pro over the next little bit as I use them to make more content, play some games and who knows what else the AI upgrades will bring to the device once it launches in a few stages later this year.

The iPhone 16 Pro costs $1,449 and comes with 128GB of storage. The 16 Pro Max starts at $1,749, but its base model comes with 256GB of storage. The devices are all made of Titanium and come in White, Black, Natural, and Desert. The large phone in my photos is the Derst model, and the smaller one is Natural.

See you next week, same time, same place for all the video samples!

– Additional photography by Alex Arellano