iPhone 17 Review: Genuinely Excellent Value

There are a series of camera updates on the iPhone 17. The device still has a dual camera system, with a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera (up from the 12-megapixel ultrawide on the iPhone 16) and a 48-megapixel main camera. There’s still no telephoto camera, despite the fact that some of the competition in this price bracket has started getting full triple camera systems, like the Google Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S25.

You can still take “telephoto” photos with the device, though. Apple uses a sensor crop technology on the main camera to deliver so-called “optical quality” 2x zoom photos. That definitely helps lessen the impact of not having an actual telephoto camera.

As a whole, unsurprisingly, the iPhone 17 captured vibrant and detailed images every time. Colors were bright and natural, and details were excellent until you started to zoom a little bit further than the image processing tech could handle. The lack of a telephoto camera meant that images at around 4x or 5x started to look a little grainy, but anything less than that produced generally solid photos. This is perhaps where devices like the Galaxy S25 and Pixel 10 excel, considering the fact that they do have a telephoto camera, even at this price point. Unless you zoom into your shots frequently, you may not miss the telephoto camera all that much. That said, I’d be lying if I said that images zoomed to 10x or so didn’t look much better on the Pixel and Galaxy devices.

Still, I was very happy with how the camera on the iPhone 17 performed. Images were detailed and vibrant, with relatively natural-looking colors. The colors captured by the iPhone 17 looked a little more natural than those captured by the Galaxy S25, although you could easily change that using Photographic Styles on the iPhone. Low-light images looked very good on the iPhone 17 too. Again, the Pixel and Galaxy devices did capture better zoomed low light shots when it came to capturing detail, but the iPhone seemed to produce brighter images.

My favorite upgrade on the iPhone 17, however, comes on the front of the device. There’s a new 18-megapixel front-facing camera with Center Stage — and the best thing about it is that it’s a square sensor. That means that rotating your camera to landscape orientation doesn’t do anything — the sensor is a square. Instead, there’s now a little button in the camera UI that lets you switch between portrait and landscape orientations, which is super cool. You can also switch between using a tighter crop, or zooming out — and the device will automatically switch between those two depending on how many people are in the shot. That said, you can manually change the crop if you want to capture more of your background.

There are some other camera-related features on offer here too. There’s a new Dual Camera mode that lets you capture through both the rear and front-facing cameras, for example. It’s a neat feature, though I don’t go to nearly enough concerts to actually make use of it.