Amateur Photographer verdictThe new added photography-centric features of the iPhone 18 Pro make it the best Apple ever in terms of the camera. Elsewhere, its broadly similar to last years excellent model.ProsVariable aperture lensTriple high-resolution sensorsAdded manual controlsConsLimited coloursStill no telephoto macroSomewhat minor upgrade overall It seems pretty inevitable that the iPhone 18 Pro (and its larger variant, the iPhone 18 Pro Max) will end up near the top of our list of the best smartphones for photographers.

　　As we often see with most flagships – from all brands – the latest model includes a few incremental upgrades from the previous version. It’s probably not quite enough to tempt you to buy if you bought an iPhone 17 Pro last year, but if you’re upgrading after a longer period then you’ll likely notice a bigger difference.

　　That said, this year there have been some interesting and notable upgrades to the camera. The big news here is that for the first time ever, the main lens now has a variable, and controllable aperture. But there’s also been some additions made to the way the native camera app operates which arguably makes this the most appealing iPhone ever for photographers.

　　Let’s take a closer look.

　　iPhone 18 Pro at a glance 48MP wide camera with variable aperture (f/1.4-f/4) 48MP ultrawide camera 48MP 4x telephoto 18MP “Center Stage” selfie camera, f/1.9 aperture 4K 120p video recording 6.3” Super Retina XDR OLED screen (6.9” iPhone 18 Pro Max also available) Aluminium unibody design with Ceramic Shield back and Ceramic Shield 2 front How I test the iPhone 18 Pro I test smartphones from the point of view of a photographer. So I’ll pay special attention to the onboard cameras, the native app by which you control them and any other relevant features which may be worth mentioning – such as the ability to shoot raw format. I’ll also consider related things such as the screen size and quality, plus battery life. What I won’t comment on is things such as call quality or what the phone is like for gaming.

　　iPhone 18 Pro – Features The iPhone 18 Pro sticks with three high-resolution 48MP sensors for its wide, ultrawide and telephoto cameras. The ultrawide and telephoto cameras appear to be the same as in the iPhone 17 Pro mode, giving you a 13mm equivalent, plus a 100mm equivalent, with 8x “optical quality” zoom built in.

　　Although in many ways the main 1x camera seems to be the same before, Apple says it’s a new sensor for the iPhone 18 Pro series. While it remains a 48MP sensor with a 24mm equivalent lens in front of it, the big new feature here is that the lens has a variable aperture. By default it will shoot at f/1.8, but you can change it to f/1.4, f/2.8 or f/4 if you prefer.

　　Its not just the aperture you can change. The app now includes manual control of shutter speed and white balance, too, and you can display a live histogram to see the effects.

　　The selfie camera is again the same 18MP device as found in the iPhone 17 Pro. This is an interesting feature because it uses a square sensor meaning you can shoot vertical or horizontal selfies without having to change the way you hold the phone – you simply tap a button on the screen. It also allows the field of view to widen automatically if more people enter the selfie frame, and there’s still the ability to record dual capture video (where the front camera and the rear camera both record at the same time).

　　There’s an array of high-end video functionality included as always, including 4K Dolby Vision Video, spatial video recording, Genlock support and more besides. A new feature for the iPhone 18 Pro is the ability to add “Cinematic” effects (shallow depth of field effect) to your videos after you’ve shot them. There’s also now the new pro controls available for video too.

　　Elsewhere, in many ways the iPhone 18 Pro is very similar to its predecessor. It has the same size screen (either 6.3” or 6.9” inch for the iPhone 18 Pro Max), the same resolution and 120Hz refresh rate and the same 3000 nits peak brightness.

　　The size and shape of the iPhone 18 Pro is the same as the iPhone 17 Pro but there are some internal upgrades. For example, it’s now using a newer chip (A20 Pro vs A19 Pro – promised to be up to 20% faster than its predecessor), battery life is a little better and there’s faster wired charging. There’s also a bigger vapour chamber inside, which is better for heat dispersion in the body which should improve performance – this could be useful for those who like to do things like video editing and so on.

　　Apple doesn’t disclose its battery capacity as other manufacturers do, but we are told the iPhone 18 Pro is capable of 34 hours video playback, compared to 31 before. For the iPhone 18 Pro Max, we now get 43 hours playback, compared to 37 hours playback. In real world usage, I find that the iPhone 18 Pro easily lasts a full day without needing charging, even with reasonably heavy or intense usage. For the iPhone 18 Pro Max, you might conceivably be able to push it to two full days.

　　Available in four different colours, there’s black, silver, burgundy or glacier (a sort of light blue colour).

　　iPhone 18 Pro – Handling and Design The iPhone 18 Pro comes in two different sizes, the regular 6.3” and the larger 6.9” Max variant. I much prefer the smaller iPhone 18 Pro size, and I’m glad to say that once again, you’re not “punished” for opting for a smaller device by getting an inferior camera. In that respect, you can basically think of this is as a review of the iPhone 18 Pro Max as well, at least in terms of the cameras.

　　If you have larger hands or just prefer a bigger screen, the Max is a lovely large device and really shows off your photos and videos extremely well.

　　I’ve been using both a “Glacier” iPhone 18 Pro and a “Burgundy” one. Both are very nice colours, but the Glacier is a little more understated. I’ve also noticed that the darker colours show up finger smudges a lot more than the lighter colours – as well as the burgundy I also noticed it on the Black iPhone 18 Pro Max I’ve been able to use a few times too, whereas the silver and the Glacier don’t show them up. If you’re going to be using your iPhone 18 Pro/Max in a case this barely matters, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

　　The size and screen are the same as the iPhone 17 Pro. The Super Retina XDR screen resolution of the 18 Pro is 2622 x 1206 pixels, with a 120Hz refresh rate and 3000 nits peak brightness. While it also looks great, it’s worth noting that there are much brighter displays currently on the market – Apple is starting to look a little bit behind in that regard. On the big plus side, if you do happen to be upgrading from only a year ago, that’s great news for any cases or accessories you already own.

　　To that end, you’ll also see that as with the iPhone 17 Pro, the cameras are housed in a “plateau” on the back of the phone. This allows for greater space for the antenna and vapour chamber to better dissipate heat. Moving this for the iPhone 17 Pro series also allowed for a larger battery and therefore improved battery life. There’s another improvement here too, but this likely comes from the better power management and heat dissipation.

　　One thing that has changed here is the Dynamic Island – that’s all the functionality contained within the “notch” at the top of the screen. It’s been redesigned so that it’s a little bit smaller – it’s more noticeable on the iPhone 18 Pro Max than on the smaller device – and can also control more things at once than before. I find it to be a genuinely useful way to quickly access the things I’m using on my phone.

　　Once again we see a Ceramic Shield 2 front – this promises 3x better scratch resistance than older models such as the iPhone 15 Pro. My phone has been slung in my bag with other items, including my wallet and so on and doesn’t have a mark on it so far.

　　On either side of the phone we have an Action Button and the Camera Control button. The Action Button can be assigned to a shortcut, such as launching the camera (that’s what I do, but others may prefer to have it launching the torch or something else).

　　The Camera Control button has been around for a couple of generations and has a bit of a love it/hate it vibe about it. I don’t really get on with it, but I know others find it great. With it you can launch the camera, but also control certain aspects of the camera, such as the choice of lens, and now for the first time, the aperture you’re shooting with. The reason I don’t like it is that I find it a bit over sensitive and therefore too easy to make settings changes that I don’t want, but, it’s also fair to say that the more time you spend using it, the more intuitive it feels.

　　IP68 ratings are included here – it’s been the same for years with the iPhone series. Some other brands on the market now have IP69 ratings, but you don’t get that much extra functionality by having the “9”, so I don’t think this is a massive negative point.

　　As before MagSafe gives you access to a huge range of accessories, including specialised cases but also wireless chargers. Wireless charging up to 25W is available. Wired charging has been improved slightly, you can now get up to 50% charge in just 15 minutes, up from 20 minutes before if you have a 60W adapter (40W was the maximum before). I use an Anker MagSafe wireless charger overnight with my iPhone and I love the way it snaps perfectly into place and therefore charges correctly every time.

　　iPhone 18 Pro – what is the camera app like? Although the appearance of the native camera app for the iPhone 18 Pro remains broadly the same as for the iPhone 17 Pro, there’s been some big new additions and you’ve now got more control than ever before.

　　You’ll usually be shooting in the standard Photo mode, which is where you’ll actually find most of the controls you’re going to need or use. There’s no separate Pro or Manual mode, but new controls have been added in here.

　　Here you can also access all of the three lenses, plus “lenses” in between, such as 1.2x, 1.5x, 2x and 8x – all of which crop into the sensor, but are selectable right there on screen as if they were real lenses.

　　Apple continues to use the ultrawide for macro images. All you need to do to use it is to bring the phone close to the subject and you’ll see the little flower icon pop up indicating you’re in macro mode. You can switch it off if you don’t want to use it – sometimes I do that if I’d prefer to use the 1x lens and it’s still able to focus.

　　When you’re shooting a person or an animal, you will also notice the “f” symbol pop up, indicating portrait mode is available. You can choose to tap it to switch it on at this point, but even if you don’t, all the relevant information will be captured so you can convert your image to a portrait later on if you like.

　　Night mode is another automatic feature – the phone just needs to detect low light for it to pop up. You can extend how long night mode shoots for, or turn it off altogether if you feel it’s not working out for you.

　　So now for the new controls. If you tap the button at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a host of new tools at your disposal, including shutter speed, white balance and of course aperture. Also a new addition for this release is the live histogram, so you can check how well balanced your exposures are.

　　The most commonly used default aperture is f/1.8, but the phone will automatically detect if light is bright and it can therefore use a narrow aperture. But, you can also take control of it yourself too and choose between the different options.

　　What’s interesting about this is that you can now use the narrower apertures to create sunstars in your image, something that simply wasn’t possible before. I’ve had great fun making them in low light scenes and they certainly add a little “sparkle” to an image. Take a look at these comparisons to see how the different apertures convert into sunstars with the lights in this scene.

　　Of course, also being able to change the aperture means you can get more or less of the background in focus, depending on your preference. This works more noticeably than I thought it would, but it’s not entirely clear whether or not the phone is being “helped” by processing.

　　Changing settings is pretty straightforward, and there are a couple of options to think about here. You can have it set so the phone resets to the default options, or, you can have it so the phone remembers what you last left it on. I opt to have it reset, because otherwise I find myself shooting in f/4 when I don’t mean to. But if you have a better memory than me and perhaps don’t want to keep resetting things, it’s worth switching this on.

　　You can also add your most used settings to the control bar at the top of the screen, meaning for example, aperture is a quick tap away any time you want it.

　　Arguably there’s a lot of new stuff crammed into a fairly small space with the new iPhone 18 Pro layout, but on the other hand, not having to delve into different shooting modes is also quite good – whether you like this setup is very much down to personal preference, and I’m a little undecided right now – ask me again when I’ve been using the phone for a few months.

　　Focus tracking is something that has been added for this model for the first time too. This works by tapping on a subject and the phone will stay focused on them, even if they leave and re-enter the scene. It’s quite clever and can be useful for photographing your kids, pets or other moving subjects.

　　Photographic Styles is something which I love using, as it’s a quick and easy way to change up how your images look. For this model we’ve now got Photographic Styles 3, which brings some new functionality, namely the ability to add Grain and Texture to the different filters available. It’s a bit strange that this hasn’t come to older models via a firmware upgrade, but perhaps it will at a later date. The “grain” added basically makes your shot look like they were shot on film – or perhaps a Y2K digicam and is a very trendy thing at the moment. Fortunately you can turn it off again if the fad goes away and the preference is once more for clean and crisp images!

　　Photo editing using AI is available and there’s been some additions made to this with the introduction of iOS27. These are also available to older iPhone models which can run the latest iOS too. This includes the ability to “reframe” your image, where the background will be extended and even the viewpoint from which you were shooting from modified. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it looks downright odd.

　　More useful, I find, is functionality such as the ability to remove things from the scene which might otherwise spoil your shot – a stray tourist or a bin for example, rather than anything too heavy handed.

　　Apple Reference Image is a feature which is not available in Europe so I’ve not been able to test this out. This essentially gives you a verified / stamped image which shows the original and any modifications that have been made. The idea is for important or news based images to be authentic, but, like I say, it’s not something I’m able to comment on.

　　iPhone 18 Pro – Performance With a very similar camera set up to the previous generation, image quality from the iPhone 18 Pro is broadly similar to before. If you’re coming from the iPhone 17 Pro you probably won’t notice a huge step in most ordinary situations. However, as is usually the case, if you’re more sensibly upgrading from a much older model – such as the iPhone 15 Pro, the differences will be much more noticeable.

　　Of course, you can now change the aperture of the main lens, so this does have an impact on image quality. Being able to blur, or not blur the background, is a useful tool. And the ability to create sunstars is great and fun too – both of these things are simply not possible with the older model, so it’s arguably enough by itself to tempt even recent purchasers of the iPhone 17 Pro to upgrade.

　　Shooting with the default Photographic Styles gives you pretty natural colours. Some might argue they’re a little on the dull side, but no worries, if you want more vibrancy, simply use one of the other Styles available my favourite is Amber as it recreates the look of Kodak Gold, and the great thing here is that you can change to a different style any time you like, even a long time after you’ve taken the shot.

　　Detail is pretty well resolved, while exposures are generally very well balanced too. The quality of the onboard iPhone cameras has been excellent for some time, so I wasn’t expecting anything less really.

　　As usual, it’s the 1x lens which puts in the best result, but the ultrawide also does very well. The telephoto lens is good, and even the 8x “optical quality” zoom is very usable. Go beyond this and things do start to become a bit smudgy as you’d expect – but if you do desperately need to get closer and only intend to look at pictures on the phone screen, it’s not too bad.

　　Close-up photography using the macro mode is pretty good, but there is better out there. Smartphones which use the telephoto lenses for macro work tend to produce the best results, models such as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra for example.

　　Low light / night photography works well, with the multiple frames being merged together to create great results. In my image here above, I could barely see the details here with my naked eye, but the phone has picked out lots of them. See also a gallery of general low light images.

　　Portraits are rendered well with a nice background blur. There’s a bit of fussiness when hair isn’t perfectly smooth, but that’s pretty much the same for every phone out there. I like being able to add the new “Glow” to portraits, as it just lifts them a little bit and makes them more vibrant, but it’s a fairly subtle shift compared to the previous model.

　　The selfie camera is the same as last year and once again delivers some nice results, particularly in good light.

　　iPhone 18 Pro – Value for Money Prices for the iPhone 18 Pro have gone up compared to the previous generation, they’re now $100/£100 more expensive than before – but that’s broadly in line with what pretty much every manufacturer has been doing and is not really a surprise, everything is just more expensive at the moment.

　　That means the base model (256GB) will set you back $1199/£1199, and add on another $100/£100 every time you go up in size. The iPhone 18 Pro Max is another $100/£100 again.

　　It’s not cheap by any means, but iPhones hold their value the best of pretty much any brand, so you can at least know that when you come to trade it in you’ll likely get a decent price back for it, compared to something like a Xiaomi, Oppo or even a Google. Samsungs come pretty close, but still not quite as high as iPhones, generally speaking.

　　There is no iPhone 18 base model this year, so if you want a brand new iPhone and want to look down the range, for now you’ll have to go for the iPhone 17. Rumours suggest the iPhone 18 will launch in Spring instead this year.

　　Comparing the phone to Android competitors, other flagships include the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Google Pixel 11 Pro and a world of other devices from the likes of Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and more. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is currently significantly more expensive (retail) than the iPhone 18 Pro, but you do get a bigger screen and an extra lens. The Pixel 11 Pro is about the same price as an iPhone 18 Pro.

　　Does all of this make the iPhone 18 Pro good value for money? I’d argue yes on the whole it does – it’s in line with competitors and will hold its value better. You get a decent amount for your money, and as long as you don’t set your sights on upgrading every year, it should last you a decent length of time too.

　　iPhone 18 Pro – Verdict As usual, there’s a heck of a lot to like about the iPhone 18 Pro (and the iPhone 18 Pro Max).

　　But also as usual, this is an incremental upgrade that I wouldn’t generally recommend jumping to if you already own last year’s model.

　　That said, we are a photographic publication and the iPhone 18 Pro brings some genuinely new photographic improvements not seen before in an iPhone. Even if you’ve got an iPhone 17 Pro, then you should still find there’s a significant upgrade here – the addition of manual controls, the new Photographic Styles, and most importantly from a hardware perspective, the variable aperture lens.

　　Of course, if you’re coming from an older iPhone model, such as iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 Pro it’s definitely going to be a noticeable jump. Although we have some new features here for iPhone 18 Pro, image quality for the most part is broadly similar, with the device itself remains the same in terms of screen size, type, brightness and so on.

　　Overall, I would of course be inclined to agree that this is the best iPhone ever – of course the latest model is, but I would also go further and say it’s the best iPhone Apple has ever made for photographers. I’d suggest jumping to the iPhone 18 Pro and sticking with it for a while – whether there will be yet more photographic improvements next year remains to be seen, but it certainly feels like this is the best photo jump that there will be for a while.

　　iPhone 18 Pro Full specifications {"@type":"Product","name":"iPhone 18 Pro","description":"Specifications for iPhone 18 Pro","brand":{"@type":"Brand","name":"iPhone 18 Pro"},"additionalProperty":[{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Main, wide-angle camera","value":"48MP, 24mm, f/1.4-f/4, sensor-shift optical image stabilisation (OIS)"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Telephoto camera","value":"48MP, 100mm, f/2.8, 4x telephoto, sensor-shift OIS"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Ultra-wide camera","value":"48MP, 13mm, f/2.2, 120 u00b0 field of view, Hybrid Focus Pixels"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Selfie camera","value":"18MP, f/1.8 "center stage""},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Video","value":"4K Dolby Vision 24p, 25p, 30p, 60p"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Battery","value":"34 hours video playback, wired/wireless charging"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Screen","value":"6.3-inch, 120HZ OLED Super Retina XDR display, 2622 x 1206-pixel resolution at 460ppi, anti-reflective coating"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Processor","value":"Apple A20 Pro"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Storage","value":"256GB, 512GB, 1TB"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Operating system","value":"iOS 27"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Dimensions","value":"150 x 71.9 x 8.75mm"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Weight","value":"211g"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"Dust and water resistance","value":"IP68 (maximum depth of 6 metres up to 30 minutes)"}]} Scroll to see more →

　　I review iPhones for a living – these are the best iPhones for photography I’m OBSESSED with this hidden iPhone camera trick that makes all your photos look like they were shot on Kodak Gold film 5 genius things to do with your old iPhone rather than leaving it in a closet Do you want to win some great prizes for your photography? Enter your photos in our International Amateur Photographer of the Year competition. Free entry for photographers aged 13-21.

　　Follow AP onFacebook,Instagram,YouTube,TikTokandIrys.