Pro mode on Apple iPhone 18 Pro (Max) degrades image quality

Arguably the biggest camera upgrade on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max is the 48-megapixel main camera, which now offers a variable aperture that can be adjusted from f/1.5 to f/4.0. However, the flagship smartphones also ship with an enhanced camera app that gives users more manual control than before – in addition to the aperture, the shutter speed can also be adjusted manually.

An in-depth camera test by DPReview, which includes numerous comparison images, now shows that one of these two settings has a negative impact on image quality. While manually selecting the aperture has no significant impact on image processing, the same does not apply to images captured with a manually set shutter speed. 

As soon as automatic shutter speed control is disabled, the iPhone stops taking and combining multiple images in rapid succession to achieve better image quality through frame stacking. By combining images with different exposures, the smartphone can achieve a wider dynamic range and produce photos with less image noise. 

However, if the shutter speed is set manually, stacking multiple photos would be counterproductive, as the final result would ultimately not reflect the actual shutter speed selected by the user. While this approach therefore makes sense, it leads to darker photos with significantly more image noise, particularly at night. Night mode cannot be activated at all when the shutter speed is set manually. So while manually setting the shutter speed is an option on the iPhone 18 Pro, photographers should bear in mind that this choice can lead to visibly worse results, especially at night.