Taiwan 2024 - New Taipei, Chin Lee University Dorms / D850 vs. iPhone 15 Pro SHOWDOWN

Before this trip my wife and I had recently purchased new iPhone 15's.  I got the fancy Pro model, which is supposed to have a very good camera.  As mentioned in posts through the years, pictures taken with a phone camera have been greatly disappointing when compared to a DSLR.

But in light of the hype surrounding the greatly improved camera in the iPhone 15 Pro, I put a little more faith in the quality of its pics.  In fact, because it's possible to be more discreet, on many occasions I used the phone camera to supplant the Bigger Cahoona.  My hope was that they'd turn out well enough to actually be blogworthy.  But the facts of the case remained to be seen, so I took a pair of identical photos to compare the two in post capture after arriving back home.  This qualifies as a true comparison because they both boast a 48 MP sensor.  So here we are.

The pic above was taken of some university dorms at the next-door Chin Lee University of Technology, from the balcony of our "home away from home" in New Taipei City.  I was careful to use the same zoom level with both cameras (82 millimeters).  The pic above was captured with the D850.

Below is the same composition using the iPhone 15:

While the exposure level is different and could have been adjusted in the D850 to more closely match that created by the iPhone, I was careful not to do anything in Photoshop so that the pic is exactly as processed by the camera.  As can be seen, other than the exposure difference the two photos look pretty much the same.

What we see below is where the "rubber meets the road", as they say.  I tightly cropped both of the pictures, focusing on a balcony that offered more color and detail:

As shot with the Nikon D850 -

As shot with the iPhone 15 Pro:

And seeing this, the VERDICT IS IN!  The D850 far surpasses, in both color and detail, what one gets out of the iPhone 15 Pro.  I had asked myself, Now that phone cameras have made such significant advertised improvements in technology, was buying the D850 - or even the D300s before then - a waste?  The answer is no, no, and NO!  Still totally justified, and confident that a DSLR, especially at the professional level, is the go-to technology.

HAVING SAID THAT, the quality out of the phone is good enough to post so long as they aren't cropped in much at all.  Thus there are plans to create a section at the end of the Taiwan 2024 series featuring only those.