Apple iPhone X review

Portrait mode

Portrait mode uses the telephoto camera and some software trickery to create a photo with a faux bokeh. Now the new Portrait Lighting enhances on this shooting with new effects - the now camera scans the scene, identifies the face of your subject and adjusts the tone curve of the face to make it better lit. And you can change the effect after you've taken a shot.

And if you are keen on using those Stage Light effects, just don't expect the results to be great every time. A lot of times, the success would depend on the color of the clothes you are wearing and even on your haircut or hair color.

Natural Light • Studio Light • Contour Light • Stage Light • Stage Light Mono

And here are some more portrait shots.

Apple iPhone X 12MP Portrait samples

You can also use the portrait mode with objects, though the algorithm was tweaked to work with faces, so don't expect flawless results.

Portrait samples of objects

Panorama

The iPhone X offers 180-degree panoramic shots, and they can go up to 15,000 x 4,000 pixels or 60MP. The stitching is great, there are no artifacts, and the color rendering is good, too. The HDR panoramic shots are here to stay, and with the new rendering - everything looks just great.

You can also shoot telephoto panoramic shots, and they are as impressive as the regular ones.

Apple iPhone X panorama

Selfies

The front-facing camera has the same 7MP unit we saw on the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8 and 8 Plus. It can use the so-called Retina flash, where your screen lights your face up in particular color to provide more pleasing skin tones depending on the color of the available light.

There is plenty of resolved detail, though not the best we've seen. The contrast and colors are very good, while the exposure is always based on the human subject, which leaves the background overexposed at times.

Apple iPhone X 7MP selfie samples

What the iPhone X offers more than the preceding iPhones is the employment of the Face ID sensor to achieve native Portrait mode for the selfie photos. This should produce equally good portrait shots like the ones taken with the main camera.

Apple iPhone X 7MP portrait selfies

4K video recording at 60fps

Apple iPhone X brings new video recording modes, all of them - optically stabilized as usual. There are now 4K at 60fps and 1080p at 240fps. Those are available exclusively when the camera is set to store pictures and videos on the new high-efficiency format (H.265 HEVC). The regular 4K at 30 fps, 1080p at 30, and 1080p at 60fps are available for both H.264 and HEVC. And now there is a new film mode as well - 4K at 24fps.

All of these modes are accessible for the telephoto camera, and you get a zoomed view, naturally. The telephoto now has optical image stabilization, which should help a lot.

The camcorder UI is as simple as it can get, offering nothing but the flash setting. You can find the resolution and file format switch in the Settings menu instead of having a shortcut in the viewfinder, which is as annoying as it has ever been. The video options along with the other camera related settings are all buried far away in the iOS Settings menu.

The H.264 4K videos carry a bitrate of around 46Mbps, but audio is recorded in mono at 96Kbps in AAC format. Yes, Apple may be pioneering the 4K video with 60fps, but it's still stuck in mono audio capturing for a decade. Let that sink in. If that's not lazy, we don't know what is. Apple should have a look at what LG and Nokia are doing in this field.

The 1080p videos at 30fps have a bitrate of 16 Mbps, keeping the same audio, while the 60fps ones came out with 23Mbps bitrate.

The H.265 4K videos at 60fps carry a bitrate of 54Mbps, while the audio is still mono. The 4K at 30fps clips are captured at 24Mbps - half the H.264 ones. The 1080p 30 and 60fps bitrate are also halved at 8.5 and 12.5 Mbps respectively.

The 4K videos captured both at 60, and 30 fps are virtually identical in quality. The picture is very close to the still images - plenty of detail but just average foliage presentation. The colors are great, and so is the contrast and white balance. There are no focus issues or compression artifacts. And once again - the dynamic range is nothing short of impressive.

The 1080p videos, both 30 and 60 fps, turned out the same. Zooming into 200% even revealed some advantage in favor of the HEVC clips, which seems impossible. Anyway, the 1080p videos captured by the iPhone X are one of the best, as usual, with lots of detail, smooth frame rate, and amazing dynamic range. The foliage looks somewhat better here.

The telephoto camera offers the same video capturing abilities - all the way up to 4K at 60fps. In good light, the it matches the main one in video quality. Detail levels are high, sharpening is balanced, and dynamic range is almost as wide as on the main camera, which is impressive considering the smaller sensor size.

When the light is low, the iPhone X will, once again, use a digitally-zoomed wide-angle camera, instead of the telephoto one.

We snapped a quick 4K video testing the optical stabilization of both the wide and telephoto camera. Here it is.

The Apple iPhone X is ready to meet the competition in our Video Compare Tool.

Apple iPhone X vs. iPhone 8 Plus vs. Galaxy Note8 in our 4K video compare tool

Telephoto: Apple iPhone 8 Plus vs. iPhone 7 Plus vs. Galaxy Note8 in our 4K video compare tool

You can directly download the wide-angle 4K@60fps (HEVC) (66MB, 10s), 4K@60fps telephoto (HEVC) (67MB, 10s), 4K@30fps (HEVC) (31MB, 10s), 1080p@30fps (HEVC) (11MB, 11s), and 1080p@60fps (HEVC) (15MB, 10s) video samples.