868: Tyler Stalman Reviews iPhone 18 Pro Camera

Cinematic mode.

I always enjoy your coverage of this because I feel like that's another thing that you really kind of opened my eyes to.

And this year it changed.

What do you think?

Yeah, I know they actually, they quietly changed the algorithm so that it is now leaning more on just using one lens.

You know, I think there's always been a bit of confusion around it.

Like, is it LiDAR? Is it the two different lenses measuring distance? So previously there was some amount of both lenses having some awareness of the distance of objects away.

Now it basically just looks at the RGB images like, okay, I know what to do with this because machine learning is where it is and it understands 3D space somehow.

It's kind of magic.

What it doesn't do better though, is the actual cutting out of objects, especially hair, like really fine details.

And for that reason, I often don't lean into it.

Um, it has, it doesn't allow me to shoot Apple log.

So it'd be cool if it did.

I might like try it a little more often if I could combine it with Apple log, but you only get it with those iPhone colors.

Um, And I think most of all, like there's a lot of people that just like it.

So maybe I'll speak to like, if you already like using it, you can add it afterwards now, which is great.

Like way more flexibility for everybody.

And it can also shoot in 60 frames per second.

So you can also slow it down.

And that I would say generally just don't make the background too blurry because that's when you start to see the cutouts looking kind of fake.

Just leave it like barely on and you'll get some of that separation still a lot more than the phone would have on its own, but you're not going to have.

Like I find when you turn it up, those videos are going to age like milk in five years when you're like, what were we doing? Like the algorithm is going to get better and you'll still be looking at a video from, from way back in 2026 when it wasn't perfected yet.

I love this part of your review where you're showing cinematic mode and it looks okay.

You could totally tell your left glasses lens as we're looking at you.

It's like, it's struggling to figure out where is it supposed to go? And then you basically tell us the viewer, like, if you want it to look like a film, like really professional, just shoot in log two and use a LUT because the colors and the look you get here looks more professional than just getting a blurry background where certain elements are just not clear.