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A new word is being thrown about to describe theiPhone 16familys main rear camera.
Its the 48MP Fusion Camera.
The iPhone 16 in Black, White, Pink, Teal and Ultramarine
But it didnt describe theiPhone 15as having a Fusion Camera in the last generation.
But theres also some substance behind the name.
Its time for a closer look.
The iPhone 16 in Black, White, Pink, Teal and Ultramarine
48MP Fusion camera: the cynical take
Why Fusion?
Iconic film director James Camerons 3D shooting array was dubbed the Fusion Camera System.
Cameron co-developed it with director of photography Vince Pace.
GoPros first 360-degree camera was also called the Fusion, released back in 2017.
The term Fusion has a fairly powerful sense of merging physicality and technology.
Does the same apply to the iPhone 16?
Its 48MP primary rear camera gets the Fusion label, not the entire rear array.
And there are actually several feature candidates for the reasoning behind the name.
Just about all very high-resolution phone camera sensors use whats known as a Quad Bayer array.
There are many millions of these in a camera sensor.
And a sub-pixel photosite for each colour underneath.
This is why the iPhone 16 kinda has a 48MP camera and a 12MP one at the same time.
The iPhone 16 in Black, White, Pink, Teal and Ultramarine
Thats called pixel binning, used for greater light sensitivity.
In practice, phone manufacturers typically use the quarter resolution mode until you select a high-res one.
This makes sense when we are still dealing with somewhat limited information with these Quad Bayer designs.
But here there are four of each per pixel brick.
But in good light?
Sure, an iPhone 16s 48-megapixel mode will be worth playing around with.
The iPhone 16 family adds a third shooting mode to counter this 24MP.
An iPhone 16 can also take a 2x 12MP zoom image, using a sensor crop.
Companies like to claim this is a form of lossless zoom, including Apple.
Theres a problem here.
All of this was already in place in the last generation of iPhone.
The 48MP camera came to the iPhone 15.
It had a 24MP mode, and a 12MP mode too.
It also does not appear Apple has upgraded the sensor this time around either.
Apple has kinda done this with the iPhone 16 series too.
And all it took was a nudge of the second sensor.
In the standard iPhone 15 andiPhone 15 Plus, the standard and ultra-wide cameras sit across a diagonal.
This has been switched up for a more conventional vertical arrangement in the iPhone 16 family.
It looks less jaunty, sure, but means the two lenses can be used as a stereoscopic pair.
Last year this feature was limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
They already had those lined-up wide and ultra-wide camera lenses.
Apple hasnt suggested the whole stereoscopic capture thing is the reason for the ‘Fusion’ tag.
It also bears much more of a relation to those previous uses of the term by Cameron and GoPro.
Will the iPhone 16 camera be better than the iPhone 15’s?
One final possibility is perhaps the ideal one: Apple has learnt how toBayer betterin this generation.
Does Fusion really mark the creation of something new?
