The iPhone 17 series is nearly here – Apple has announced that its annual September event will take place on September 9, which is less than a week away at the time of writing. We’re expecting full reveals for the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Naturally, we’re expecting the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max to bring the most advanced upgrades – one such rumored upgrade concerns the 5x telephoto camera, which has been tipped to get a resolution bump from 12MP up to 48MP.
That’s four times as many pixels total twice as many on both the vertical and horizontal axes – a 48MP sensor would make the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera better at picking up fine detail, so long as the sensor is of an equivalent or larger size to its predecessor.
Android inspiration
The move to a 48MP telephoto camera would see all three iPhone cameras sporting the same resolution for the first time since the iPhone 13 Pro launched in 2021 with three 12MP cameras. That symmetry could have positive impacts beyond looking good on the spec sheet.
Back in March, I tested the Xiaomi 15, which sports a camera system with three 50MP sensors. The phone comes with a wide-angle main camera, secondary ultra-wide camera, and 2.6x telephoto camera. As I wrote in our Xiaomi 15 review, this lends itself to an exceptionally consistent photography experience.
Using the Xiaomi 15, I never noticed much of a difference in image quality between the main, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras, and while a lot of this is down to Xiaomi’s great image processing, there’s something to be said for keeping the hardware as consistent as possible.
The goal for any phone maker looking to produce one of the best camera phones is to create a seamless experience, which is no mean feat when you’re working with three different cameras. If any of the cameras stands out as weaker in some way, it could end up disregarded in favor of the other options (see my previous rant about ultra-wide cameras).
Fusion zoom?
Upping the iPhone’s telephoto camera resolution to 48MP would probably see Apple use the same logic that leads it to say that the 48MP Fusion Camera (read: main camera) comes with “2x optical zoom”.
What I mean by this is that a 2x crop of a 48MP image leaves you with a 12MP image. If the image produced by the iPhone’s 48MP telephoto camera has 5x optical zoom, then doubling this produces a 12MP image at 10x digital zoom. Apple might call this “optical” quality zoom because the telephoto camera on the iPhone 16 offered a 12MP image at native resolution.
You might have worked out that this is mostly a marketing term that has little to do with actual optical zoom. But there’s a half-truth in there – if the iPhone 17 Pro can produce a good-looking 12MP image at 10x zoom, it’ll have a shot at offering the best 10x zoom on the market.
That’s a lot of impact from one relatively minor change – but just keep in mind that the above is based on rumors. We’ll get official information about the iPhone 17 series at the Apple event on September 9 – until then, let us know what you want to see from the iPhone 17 Pro in the comments below.