Comparing iPhone 13 vs. iPhone 14 for Astrophotography
&gt; I used the 1x camera, which is 26mm at f&#x2F;1.5<p>I find this way of describing the iPhone cameras frustratingly misleading. It&#x27;s not the author&#x27;s fault; Apple does it in their official specs.<p>The &quot;26mm&quot; rating is &quot;equivalent&quot;, meaning &quot;this looks like a 26mm lens on a 35mm film camera&quot;. It basically tells you the FOV angle.<p>The &quot;f&#x2F;1.5&quot; rating is <i>not</i> equivalent. It&#x27;s very dishonest to mix and match equivalent and non-equivalent specs, because it makes the lens sound a lot better than it is to non-expert readers. If they were being honest, the equivalent aperture would be a lot smaller, like f&#x2F;16 or something.<p>Every other camera mfg I am aware of will consistently use equivalent or non-equivalent for all specs, and make it clear which they are using.<p>For example, most mirrorless camera lenses are spec&#x27;d non-equivalently, meaning that a &quot;26mm f&#x2F;1.5&quot; means &quot;if you put this lens on a 35mm camera and extrapolated the output to cover the whole sensor, that&#x27;s what you would get&quot;. To understand what it will look like on a different sensor, you multiply 26 and 1.5 by the crop factor.<p>In Apple&#x27;s case, it&#x27;s actually impossible to tell what the image will look like from the specs without looking up the crop factor, which of course they don&#x27;t advertise front and center like they do this misleading tuple of specs.<p>In general, lenses with smaller f&#x2F;N aperture values tend to be better and more expensive (because they have a larger aperture, let in more light, narrower depth of field), so if you don&#x27;t mind misleading customers, you just pick the smallest denominator you can get away with.