My new iPhone 12 Pro Max has Lidar, which means it can tell when someone is lying, I guess.
I’ve been impatient to learn the many ways the new phone can help me serve my spiritual teacher’s work.
Of course, the phone hasn’t simply sat idle, waiting for me discover those special apps that will turn it into an automatic article-writing, photo-taking, video-making, karma-burning, meditating, liberating machine.
Already I’ve been able to reassure myself that I made the right decision in swapping the big camera for the phone.
In a word, the 12 Pro Max is insane. For starters, it has an enormous, beautiful OLED screen that no DSLR or mirrorless camera can match for size or quality. The high-dynamic-range processing is stunning – it can balance brightly lit and shadow areas far better than any full-size camera. It even has in-body image stabilization (IBIS) that matches or betters “real” cameras without requiring a bump in the size of the hardware.
The image quality has my mouth dropping so far you could park a battleship in it. I can shoot stills with the 65mm telephoto lens, which is said to be not as sharp as the 26mm main lens, and I can crop the photos deeply, and they still look stunning.
In short, what the iPhone 12 Pro Max gives me is everything I need for stills and video in a wonderfully capable package that fits in a jacket pocket or small belt bag. Not to mention that the audio recording and playback quality are tremendous because Apple has the resources to employ some of the best audio engineers on the planet.
I’ve attached professional XLR mics to the camera using the appropriate adapters, and the recordings sound great — I can even attach a pair of lavaliers for interviews using a splitter cable. I’ve tested it and it works.
When I recommended the phone to a friend, she said she needed a telephoto lens for wildlife and dance shots. If that were my need, I would simply buy a well-used Canon 6D full-frame body and the original 70-300mm Canon stabilized non-L Series lens. I would, of course, keep the phone as my main camera.