Following Apple’s launch of the brand new iPhone 14 Pro, we went and bought one to put its photography capabilities to the test.

We use an iPhone for lots of our on the go photography when we’re not carrying around our bulk Canon 90D. Most of the photos that you see on Wales 247 that are credited to us have been shot on one of those devices. In most cases, when we get the angles right, you’ll be hard to spot the difference.

For most of us, we use our smartphones for photography because it’s really easy. It’s a point and shoot and it does a pretty good job straight out of the box without the need to photo edit. Unless you are going to use the images professionally, and when I say that, I mean blowing them up for big advertising campaigns, the chances are photos shot on your modern day smartphone will suffice. Let’s face it, for most of us, they’ll probably end up on Facebook and Instagram, and we’ll probably never print or do anything else with them.

Those looking to purchase the latest iPhone 14 from Apple can probably be put into two or three customer groups. In group 1, you either want and must have the latest technology no matter the cost. In group 2, your contract is coming to an end and are due an upgrade (12, 18 or 24 month intervals), or group 3, your device is broken and you need a new phone. There are likely other customer groups out there as well.

Now the big question for most of us will be what’s new, what’s different with the iPhone 14 compared to previous generations, and is it worth the £849 + price tag. In this day and age, the deciding factors will likely be around battery life, new features (if any), capacity, and photography probably topping the list.

So in this review, we thought we’d do a point and shoot photography test on the iPhone 14 Pro, the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro. That way, if you’re after the latest and greatest, we’ve got you covered, and if you buy an iPhone 12 every two years, we’ve got you as well.

We’re not going to go cover technical aspects of photography such as vignetting, simply because for the majority of us we don’t even know what it is or care if we’re uploading our photos to social media.

In terms of tech specs of the phone, Apple has dazzled us with a new pro camera system featuring a 48 megapixel lens in the iPhone 14 Pro compared the iPhone 13 & 12 Pro’s 12 megapixel camera. There is also some aperture differences between the cameras lenses, meaning that the newer phone should have better depth of field, but also performing better in low light.

For the most part, including the optical zoom and digital zoom ranges on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro, they are identical. The iPhone 12 Pro on the other hand has a noticeably reduced range and the previous generation’s Smart HDR 3 for photos.

It’s only when you get down to the numbers, do you start to notice the real differences between the phones. As impressive as they are, they will only amount to marginal gains when comparing the iPhone 14 & 13 Pro models. However, on paper certainly, if you are due to upgrade from 12, then that’s when you’re going to notice bigger enhancements in the photograph quality and use cases.

In particular, if you are an iPhone 12 Pro user at the moment, the newer phones will give you better optical zoom, better aperture, better image processing, better HDR photos, different photography styles and macro photography.

In the world of smartphone photography, it’s now got to the stage where lots of the visual enhancements are due to the device’s software and post image editing going on in the background. Certainly in newer models, when comparing the iPhones 12 months apart, you’ll notice less hardware gains.

The real challenge will be spotting the difference between the photos in every day use cases. For example, if you played tourist and went around Cardiff, as we did, taking photos of popular landmarks and places, would you and your friends notice the difference when uploading them to the internet?