It’s finally new iPhone season – after months of rumors and a few weeks of waiting, the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max land on store shelves on September 19.
The best iPhones are typically some of the best camera phones, but it can be pretty difficult to understand camera specs, and Apple goes a step further by using its own marketing terms like “Fusion Camera” and “Center Stage” – it took me a few passes at the spec sheets for the iPhone 17 series to get my head around the new camera systems.
Most users just want good-looking photos and videos, but there are some real differences between each of this year’s iPhone models when it comes to camera hardware. Keep reading for a breakdown of each model’s cameras, as well as a look at what “Fusion Camera” and “Center Stage” actually mean.
Just a note before we get into things – the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max sport incredibly powerful hardware for video shooting, with a nascent ecosystem of specialized accessories. To keep things focused, in this article we’re talking about still photography only.
iPhone 17 lineup: Camera specs
Here’s a basic summary of the camera specs for each of the iPhone 17 family devices:
The iPhone Air has a single 48MP wide-angle camera.
The iPhone 17 has a 48MP wide-angle camera and 48MP ultra-wide camera.
The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max have a 48MP wide-angle camera, 48MP ultra-wide camera, and 48MP 4x zoom camera.
All four models have an 18MP selfie camera.
Fusion Camera: Resolution
Apple has keenly promoted its high-resolution rear iPhone cameras as ‘Fusion Cameras’ – and because every rear camera across the iPhone 17 lineup is a 48MP camera, they are all now known as Fusion Cameras.
Depending on your settings, your iPhone may capture images at 12MP or 24MP instead of using the full 48MP afforded by the sensor. That’s because of a process called pixel binning, which groups individual pixels together to combine data into one final pixel, capturing richer light and color information. In 12MP mode, groups of four pixels are binned together (for a detailed explanation on pixel binning, see our piece about the iPhone 16’s Fusion Camera).
The 24MP mode is a little more complex – it captures both a 48MP image and a 12MP image and then merges the best elements of both using digital processing. Ideally, this offers a midpoint between the detail of 48MP and the brightness and color of 12MP. This 24MP mode is part of why Apple calls its mobile cameras ‘Fusion Cameras’ – the final image is a fusion of the full-res and pixel-binned captures.
To switch between 12MP and 24MP for standard images, head to Settings > Camera > Formats > Photo Mode. Just below that you’ll see the Resolution Control toggle to activate 48MP shooting.
Fusion Camera: Zoom
The other side of the Fusion Camera branding is all about zoom – and Apple has made this a bit more difficult to parse. For instance, the word optical in photography usually describes the glass in the lens, but Apple uses optical as a marketing term to describe image quality. I’m going to avoid falling into those traps here.
Thanks to that Fusion Camera tech, Apple will go ahead and say that the iPhone 17 Pro is like carrying eight lenses and offers 8x optical zoom, despite having three cameras and a fixed 4x zoom – what we’d normally call 4x optical zoom since the zoom is accomplished by the glass, not digital trickery.
Apple claims that its Fusion Cameras can achieve double their original zoom length while retaining optical quality – that’s a marketing claim, not a scientific fact, but there is a kernel of truth within.
The 48MP main camera found on the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro comes with a 2x option that crops into the central 12MP of the 48MP sensor, producing a 12MP image with no lost information.
It’s a similar story for the ultra-wide camera found on the iPhone 17 and the Pro models, which crops in from 0.5x relative zoom up to 1x zoom, and the 4x telephoto camera on the Pro and Pro Max, which crops in from 4x to 8x zoom. \
This sounds like the digital zoom you’d expect to find on your smartphone, but it’s a bit different.
Typical digital zoom uses a process called interpolation. The smallest resolution an iPhone camera will produce is 12MP, but long-range digital zoom will take a smaller crop of the sensor – for example, at 3x zoom the iPhone 17’s camera sensor is cropped down to just over 5MP. This is blown up and digitally enhanced to fill the 12MP frame, relying on digital processing to approximate how the image would look at this higher resolution.
Using the preset Fusion zoom levels, an image shot at 12MP really contains 12 million pixels of information, without the digital guesswork of interpolation (though there will be some upscaling if shooting at 24MP).
However, the Fusion Camera’s ‘telephoto’ mode isn’t quite the same thing as true 2x zoom. You won’t get the same depth of field or visual proportions by cropping the iPhone 17’s main lens at a 2x crop as you would by using an actual 2x lens – it just isn’t physically possible.
To Apple’s credit, these Fusion Cameras do give the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max excellent uninterpolated zoom range, spanning from 0.5x to 2x and from 4x to 8x. There’s a gap there where the main camera has to use digital zoom to reach from 2x to 4x, before switching to the dedicated zoom camera, and past 8x up to the maximum 40x is all interpolated digital zoom.
The iPhone 17 gets the same 0.5x to 2x coverage, but lacks a dedicated zoom camera, so from 2x up to its maximum 10x zoom is all interpolated. The iPhone 17 Air has only the main 48MP camera, so it gets high-res cropping between 1x and 2x before switching to interpolated zoom up to 10x.
Sensor cropping isn’t exclusive to iPhone; the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and other high-resolution camera phones can achieve similar results. Even very high-end cameras like the Leica Q3 use sensor cropping instead of truly optical zoom. We’ve nearly covered everything when it comes to Fusion Camera zoom – there’s just one more element to explain.
Apple usually expresses zoom levels in multiples of the main camera’s default zoom length, which is labelled as 1x, just like we do here on TechRadar. At the default levels, an image taken through the iPhone 17 Pro’s 4x zoom camera appears four times larger than one taken with the main lens.
However, Apple sometimes also refers to zoom levels in millimeters, referring to focal length. For example, the iPhone 17 Pro’s specs page lists the 8x Fusion zoom as a ‘200mm’ zoom. In photography, focal length is the distance between the lens and the sensor, and dictates how far away or close up the image appears. In Apple’s case, the mm spec is really an estimation of how the iPhone lens compares to a dedicated camera lens.
As I mentioned, the iPhone 17 Pro Max has three cameras – and Apple describes the focal lengths of each as follows: a 24mm wide-angle camera, 13mm ultra-wide camera, and 100mm zoom camera.
These focal lengths are fixed. That 8x ‘200mm’ zoom Apple quotes actually describes the simulation of a 200mm lens – there’s no way for a 100mm lens to extend to 200mm without physically moving, and you’d be hard pressed to find any smartphone lenses that do this.
Apple makes no distinction between real and simulated focal length. It’s unlikely to affect your experience all that much, but it’s worth knowing the truth about how your phone camera works to get the best results, especially if you’re trying to recreate shots taken with, say, an actual 200mm lens.
Center Stage selfie camera
So, that’s the rear cameras sorted, but what about the all-important selfie camera?
Every model in the iPhone 17 family – as well as the iPhone Air – comes with a new selfie camera with a square sensor. What this means is that the selfie camera now performs identically whether you hold your iPhone vertically or horizontally – no more holding your phone sideways for group selfies.
Apple calls this new selfie camera a Center Stage selfie camera. Apple has previously used the term Center Stage to refer to selfie camera tech that keeps you in frame automatically during Facetime calls and when recording video.
The iPhone 17 series gets this feature and more. On the latest iPhones, Center Stage refers to the selfie camera’s automatic switch between portrait and landscape mode depending on how many subjects are detected in the frame. The selfie camera can also crop in and out to make group photos easier. It’s a thoughtful, practical piece of design that also means your solo selfies will be of higher quality.
Thankfully, all of these new selfie controls are manually accessible with on-screen buttons, so you’re not just at the whims of automated decisions.
So, that’s the iPhone 17 series’ camera systems explained in detail – feel free to bookmark this page for future reference. For our take on everything else about the new Apple handsets, be sure to check out our iPhone 17 review, iPhone Air review, iPhone 17 Pro review, and iPhone 17 Pro Max review.
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jamie.richards@futurenet.com (Jamie Richards)
