On non-pro iPhones, Apple omits the telephoto lens. This means that if you’d like to take closeup pictures with iPhone 14, you must either move yourself or live with an artificially zoomed, subpar shot with fuzzy details. In fact, it barely qualifies as zoom since all your iPhone does is crop the scene you’re zooming into from a larger image. Can machine learning help?
Bringing machine learning to the camera app has worked for several companies like Google and Samsung. Both use it to both supercharge their phones’ telephoto cameras, allowing users to zoom up to 100x while improving the quality, too. The Google Pixel 7, for example, which has no physical zoom lens, comes equipped with a technology called “Super Res Zoom” that upscales digitally zoomed photos and produces outcomes similar to the ones a dedicated 2x telephoto camera would capture.
