 Hey guys, Thundee here and we are back with another professional photographer review. This time it's of the iPhone 11 Pro Max and I know it's been a while because this man here has been on vacation, traveling the world, all that kind of fun stuff. How you doing man? I'm good. And you? Yeah, good. So this is my buddy, Marion Sell. He is a professional photographer if you're watching this for the first time. He does some really awesome shoots. You can go check out his channel, his website and also his Instagram page to see more of his stuff. But are you excited that iPhone has expanded its camera offerings? Yes, of course, because it seems like it's about time that the iPhone also gets a few more lenses like a telephoto or like a wide-angle lens. So I was really excited to try it out because I'm an iPhone user myself. He's still on the 7 I think. So I always compared all the phones that we have tested to whatever I have in my own pocket and finally it seems like iPhone is catching up on the optical side of things. Okay, cool. So as usual, Marion will be giving you his thoughts on the iPhone 11 Pro Max camera. None of the thoughts are my own because I am not a professional. He is. So without wasting any more time, let's jump in. All right, here we go. I found this little orange car and wanted to take three photos, one with each lens to get a comparison in sharpness and in detail. The regular lens, which is basically an equivalent of 26 millimeters, that is the lens that has the biggest sensor and it is quite obviously also the sharpest lens, the lens that has the most detail. And I compared this to the lens that's called a tele lens, which is technically not the right description because the tele lens should be starting maybe around 70 millimeters equivalent. This one here is a 52 millimeter, which is typically considered a normal lens. And then we've got the super wide angle, which is actually insanely wide angle. I've been actually blown away. You can get really crazily distorted perspectives with this one. And it's super fun to play with this one. But well, looking at details, the most challenging area is of course the corner of the image. So let's look at this. The standard lens does a really good job at this. The tele or well, tele normal lens, whatever, it does a very good job as well. I think both of them are really doing a good job here. The super wide angle has a lot of falloff of sharpness to the sides, but that was expected with a wide angle lens that does not have a focus. So this one here, it has an f-stop 2.4 and it just relies on covering the whole spectrum of focus with the f-stop rather than with moving elements and optical elements. So I'm looking at details. I really like what I'm seeing here on the regular lens. I am not going to complain about this one. It is a little bit sharpened. That is not unexpected. Unfortunately, it's a JPEG only. You're not able to get RAW files out of the iPhone. There is no Pro mode, which is a little bit bummer. It would have been a game changer for Apple to do so. Comparing this to the longer lens, the leaves look a little digital. I'm not sure how much digital enhancement is in here inside this JPEG, but it does not look too bad. I'm not thrown off by any of these files actually. So we go over to a more challenging lighting situation, which is a backlit situation. In my experience, Apple and iPhones have always been doing a great job at giving you good backlit environments. It's like you keep a little bit of detail in the shadows and it is, most of the times, a very appealing environment to take photos in with an iPhone because it handles it pretty well. So I can now go ahead and this program and capture one and push the shadows, for example, in all of these shots to see what the detail really looks like when you're zooming in. So I'm going to paste this on here and maybe actually raise the exposure a little bit just to see what we really get in the shadows. Let's see. So I'm zooming in into the super wide angle. You see there's a lot of grain. Good thing here is that this grain does not yet look like JPEG compression. If you had a RAW file, this would be looking much nicer actually. Same here on the regular lens. You get a lot of noise basically, but it could be worse. So let's say for a JPEG file, this is actually pretty acceptable. And well, obviously the same thing for the longest lens. Unfortunately, no RAW files. They would have done a much, much better job in this environment. So we're looking now at a portrait mode shot, which is I took this photo in a very challenging environment because there are a lot of moving elements like the water spraying. When you import these photos with image capture, that's the program that you have to use to get the photos off your phone if you want to avoid using just a synchronization with the photo app or through iTunes, which is a little more painful. You get those images, you get two files basically. You get the one shot in the portrait mode, which is automatically taken with the longest lens. And you have no digital enhancement in the background. And you get another shot that has the digital enhancement built in, which is in this case, the aperture mode. And I think the aperture that has been selected for this shot was 4.5. So inside the phone, we can show you this. I can change the f-stop and I can make the background more and less blurry. A few of you who know this channel, they know that this is not my favorite mode. And as of right now, I've only been really happy with one with one phone's portrait mode. That was the Google Pixel, the latest one, I think. Once again, zooming in and to the details here, I don't really enjoy how the corners, the edges of her go into the background, as well as the hair. As I said, it's a challenging environment because there's a lot of moving elements like the water splash. To me, this looks very digital, especially on a big screen like this one. A few random elements that should be out of focus by now are still in focus, even though they're visibly behind her. So to me, this doesn't look really natural, but you know what? I'm really searching for it. I think you can achieve cool photos where you isolate your subjects from the background. You get a nicer feeling shot than if you were just taking a regular photograph. Alright, now we're looking at the night mode shots. And this is the standard lens. When you take photos at night time, the iPhone, it automatically suggests to do a night shot, which is a little icon that appears on the top left side of the screen. Whenever this icon appears, you can click it. You can actually tell the phone if you'd like to do a longer or a shorter version of the night time exposure. These are great. This actually is not a too challenging environment for a nighttime shot because there are a lot of lights in there. I think it's really getting interesting when there's no more light at all that's when the night mode really starts shining. Okay, but looking at these two, this is the longest lens. This is the standard lens. The standard lens has the best details and I don't want to go ahead and complain here too much because I'm quite impressed of what this phone does when you're taking a photograph out of your hand at night. But they look a little bit soft to me. They look great on the iPhone display. They do not look so great on my screen over here once they're imported. So once again, like depending on what you're doing with your images, this can be very, very much satisfying to you. A little thing that you should know is that the super wide angle lens does not allow you nighttime shots. So this is what you get when you take in the very same environment, you take a night shot with the wide angle lens and I'm going to push the exposure a little bit. You really get an understanding of that. Yeah, well, for some reason Apple did not allow us to use night shot mode on the wide angle lens. I hope it's maybe just a software thing and maybe they're going to implement it in a software update hopefully. As of right now, it does look pretty bad on the super wide angle lens. So you have to stick to the regular and the longest lens. And we, I just moved a few, well actually kilometers further, taking a night shot of a fountain. And here's something interesting. So most of the phones use the night shot by overlapping many single photographs. And I think Apple does the same thing. But interestingly here, there is an organic feel to the long time exposure as in like you see how the water spray is actually, it has a motion blur to it. So I chose on this photograph, I chose the longest exposure time that I was allowed to choose, which was inside the phone, it was telling me three seconds, but the actual exposure, at least here in the program, it says it's only a quarter of a second. But I don't believe that actually this seems to be, well, it's probably an overlay of several images, but this is at least a half second also. And the amazing thing is that this has been shot out of my hand. I think people are going to forget very quickly how complicated it was just a few years back to take photographs at night. You basically have to run around with a tripod. And this is pretty amazing, especially comparing this to like phones that are just two years old. There has been a lot of progress, digital progress in this special field of nighttime photography. Okay, I wanted to show you something that is the comparison between the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 7 at night. This here is a shot taken with the iPhone 11. And this here is a shot taken with the iPhone 7. The iPhone 7 shot, I already put a little curve on this one to brighten it up because it was even darker in original. You can see, especially in the very dark areas of this photograph, how much more detail you get out of the iPhone 11. So that's for like, let's say three years or so, three and a half years that are lying between those two phones. That is an insane improvement. You get all these details here that are completely gone in the iPhone 7, those little little lines. You get them in the night shot of the iPhone 11. That is quite fantastic. I'm really happy with this. It looks to my eyes here on the screen. It looks really digital. That's just a side effect of the night mode for me personally. But it looks pretty awesome. And on the iPhone's screen, it looks even better. And I want to show you these three frames because I do really enjoy shooting super wide angle. This one here in particular, I want to show you because in this location, in this house, it was very, very difficult to get a cool environmental shot of the house. I tried to take a photograph with my iPhone and I was running around trying to get a photograph that basically captures the feel of the house with my iPhone 7. Pretty much impossible because it is a narrow space. So with this iPhone 11 super wide angle, you really get a feel for the place, for the space. Also, you get a good feel for once again in this file now and being unfair. But you get a lot of blur towards the edges as well as you get a little bit round corners. I mean, obviously, this is a 13 millimeter equivalent. This is super, super wide angle. It would be unfair to just complain. But well, the corners are getting soft, that's for sure. Nonetheless, I couldn't have taken this photograph on a regular iPhone or just an iPhone that's like a year older than this. So I love it. Also in this one here, you get an idea of how distorted things are really getting. Like, I'm so, so close to Sophie here in this photograph. She's getting those big shoes. You know, it's like, it's really fun how much distortion you can get if you want that. I wanted to show you this one here, which is a panoramic shot on the super wide lens. And you see on the one side, you see my feet. On the other side, you see my helmet, because I was bicycle riding. And it's really cool that the iPhone allows you to take panoramic photographs on each lens, as well as vertical and horizontal. This is really easy handling panoramic modes, really enjoyable. It's not perfect. I mean, you see there are some edges that are a little bit, let's call them happy, I don't know. But this was a very night, a very dark environment. So it was also pretty challenging digitally. And of course, as usual, I went into the ocean with this phone. And I took some photographs kite surfing of my friend Prashamak in this case. Once again, super wide angle lens is awesome for action shots. Like it's kind of making everything looking very explosive. Maybe you see how all the clouds seem to be aiming into the center of the image. It's just because of this super wide angle feel of the lens. All the little water spray that's flying around me, it's really giving it a dramatic feel. I love it. The autofocus on the longest lens is also quite good. So no problems. Actually, at the time when I was taking the photographs, I didn't know how to shoot bursts. You have to basically drag the shutter to the left side, then you start shooting bursts. I want to show you one thing. So it's a complaint actually. Well, as I said, if you're shooting with this phone to keep the images on phones and look at them on smartphones, it's fantastic. It's really fun. It looks looking great. I want to show you this one here in particular though. So this is the longest lens, which everybody's calling a tele lens in comparison to actually a point and shoot tele lens shot. So this here is actually a 200 millimeter on a point and shoot. I'm not going to say the name right now because that would be unfair. Anyways, look at details. You get really, really, really sharp spray and glass and lines of the kite hands, the details in the hair. Compare that to the iPhone shot with the longest lens where actually the water spray is looking very compressed already. The clouds look so digital. It's really unfortunate. That might be a smart HDR thing. So when I was standing there in the water, I did not go into the preferences and switched the smart HDR off to get a real comparison shot here. But it looks very digital. Everything looks very sharpened. So you can't really replace glass basically with digital enhancement, but the phones are getting them. They're getting smarter and I basically wish that I had so much artificial intelligence in my professional cameras like the smartphones have these days. So you've heard Marianne's thoughts on the iPhone 11 Pro Max, but there's some things that he likes, some things he doesn't like. Where does this put you with the new iPhone 11 Pro X? So first things first, I really enjoyed taking photos with it. It's natural for me because I'm an iPhone user in the first place. And I think that for the most non-professional users, like non-professionals and like non-photographers, this is going to properly replace the need to have a bigger camera. You won't need a point and shoot anymore. If you're going on a vacation trip and you want to take photographs that you share with friends, the new lenses are fun. That's great. You can zoom in, you can zoom out, you can get lots of different perspectives. Also, I think that the editing tool inside the phone are really, really nice. It's really fun to edit. You get a nice haptic feedback whenever you're changing something. So it's actually a quite intuitive feel to it. Once you get used to it, of course, the crop tool. I have to complain about the crop tool. It's really, really painful for me. Once you're ending up in a weird format, it's difficult to get out of it. So Apple has to really write this. A little thing about filming is that you can't change lenses whilst you're filming, which is unfortunate. It would be lovely to be able to start a little film with regular lens and switch to super wide angle, switch to the longest lens. But unfortunately, iPhone or Apple only allows you to do digital zoom and not optical lens switches. It would be nice if they were allowing you to do that at one point. Yeah, but it's waterproof. It's soundproof. I mean, I was a little bit mean by taking a point and shoot photograph and comparing it to this one, but I wanted to make a point as well. If your ambition is to look at those photographs also on computer screens as well as maybe printing them, and I highly recommend having a real camera. On the other hand, I'm standing in the water getting water spray on me with my point and shoot. I'm really concerned to destroy that thing with the iPhone. It doesn't matter. You know, you can drop it underwater, you know, whatever you want, you put it, you throw it into the sand and it's definitely going to survive that. He's only saying that because last year we had one phone that died on us about two or three times. I won't mention names yet. So I love it. It's a great tool. It's fun. What else can I say? Just one more question before we wrap up. I know we haven't done a lot of phones in the second half of the year, but where do you place this camera compared to say like the P30 which we saw earlier and say even the phones we looked at last year? Do you think this is a huge improvement for Apple or do you think that they're the same level of competition? So I think that Apple is catching up. For Apple, it's a huge improvement, but the other brands like Huawei and Samsung and even OnePlus, they've already been on it. They already had a few different lenses. So I think that the Huawei was as of right now like Apple is, I didn't do it on one comparison. So I can't say which one's better or worse. We'll do that probably. But Apple is catching up and it's a good flagship phone to have for Apple, that's for sure. But I think Huawei has already been there a little while ago as well as Samsung maybe. So yeah, they're making good advertising. I think they're putting things into your head. We're thinking, wow, this is really something amazing, but it's already been around. Yeah, true. Anyway guys, thank you very much. I want to thank Marion again as always for spending the time to make this video for you guys. If there's anything you want to see and any other devices, we will be doing one on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro and also the Pixel 4. When that comes out, remember he said he loved the portrait mode on the Pixel devices. So we'll see. And maybe we even do our best stuff at the end of the year. So stay tuned. Don't forget to like and share. Definitely check out Marion's Instagram page and also his website. I'll have the links for you guys down below. Thank you very much and always enjoy your entertainment. Bye bye.