Phone photography has gotten to the point where it’s good enough for online consumption, but can those photos continue to appear in large print?
A few months ago, I posted my annual comparison between latest iPhone and current pro setup. This year’s results from the iPhone 14 Pro astounded me, but there are still many people who don’t believe it. Skepticism is expected when I boldly claim that I can print some of the photos I’ve professionally taken, meaning they’re durable enough to hang on a client’s wall. Instead of taking my word for it, I decided to find out from random people if they could tell the difference between the pictures taken with my iPhone 14 Pro. Canon R5.
I had two different scenes printed by Print space, who graciously provided these prints for comparison. I chose the sunrise and blue hour shots from my comparison, as these are the most representative of the iPhone 14 Pro’s strengths and weaknesses. If you missed my original post comparing devices, I first edited the Canon R5 image to the exact level I normally edit any of my images, then I tried my best. effort to match the iPhone 14 Pro image with the Canon R5 image.
After processing, I enhanced both images using ON1 Resize to poster size (24″x36″). I highly recommend using upscaling whenever you print large, regardless of which camera takes the picture. This will always give you better results than your print service sizing the image itself. The sunrise photo is printed on the Fuji C-Type Matte and the blue hour photo is printed on the Hahnemühle Photorag.
Rather than advance my view of the results, I decided to visit my old university campus and see if passersby could pick out which photos were taken by the iPhone 14 Pro and which ones. taken by my professional mirrorless camera or not. You can watch that experience and find the results in the video above.
Here are a few more images I’ve taken over the past few months on my iPhone 14 Pro. I’d love to hear your thoughts below or even see some of the photos you’ve taken with your new phone. It’s amazing how far they’ve come and how much we can do with a single device.
