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JPEG XL in iPhone 16 Pro Yields Incredible Results

Every year, I compare the new iPhone to my professional camera, the Canon R5. Last year's iPhone 15 Pro had lackluster results, but I can confidently say this year's iPhone 16 Pro has much more to talk about, including a "secret" update that completely blew me away. When Apple added the ability to take 48-megapixel raw images with the iPhone 14 Pro, the jump from the previous year's iPhone 13 Pro was a huge leap.

Keep in mind the phones always render better detail in the brightest parts of the image when using the quad Bayer 48 MP sensor, which is likely one reason why things change when we go to the edge of the frame. These are all taken by the iPhone 16 Pro using the main camera sensor, and as much as I'd love to trick everyone into guessing which image is which compression level, I won't be doing that because I doubt you will ever be able to tell. My brief thoughts are that its current implementation doesn't have a lot of use cases for me, but I could see it being useful over time, especially if they allow us to create more film recipes or something similar with different picture profiles.

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