The iPhone Air in Vienna

Out of Camera #11

Welcome back to Multicore.

Apologies for the lack of updates last week. I had to make a last-minute trip back to the UK for a family funeral, which — well, was not exactly under ideal circumstances, but it was good to see an entire wing of my family that I don’t often get to see.

All I brought with me was a Google Pixel Tablet, which explains the lack of productivity. (More on that thing later.) But I’m back in the saddle now, so let’s get caught up with something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

My last Out of Camera was the Xiaomi 15T Pro in Munich. Immediately after that trip, I headed on over to Vienna, a city I’d never visited before, and switched my focus to the iPhone Air.

I still really like the Air as a phone, but I did not have high hopes for its camera (yes, singular). I haven’t been a fan of the Pro line of iPhones in recent years, and the Air’s hardware is significantly cut down when compared to those.

Here is what you get on this $1,000 phone:

• 26mm-equivalent lens with a 48-megapixel 1/1.56” sensor and f/1.6 aperture

Yeah, that’s it. I’m glad this CMS accepts bullet-pointed lists with one entry.

This is basically the base-model iPhone 17 camera without the ultrawide. It’s a small sensor for a camera in this price range, and the single lens obviously limits the system’s versatility. On the other hand, shooting with one prime lens can be fun in its own right. The iPhone Air probably shouldn’t be your only camera, but I thought I’d see what I could do with it.

One note on presets. This is Out of Camera, after all, so I haven’t edited any of these photos after taking them. But I did take the time to experiment with Apple’s needlessly complex Photographic Styles setting, because honestly I find the default iPhone camera processing to be unusable for actual photos.

This year Apple added a new option called “Bright”, which I think looks tonally similar to what you get out of various Chinese competitors, and I turned the “tone” setting down to -50 in an attempt to further eliminate that telltale flat iPhone HDR look. So, these photos are what you get straight out of camera if you do that.