Phones for PR images?

By Adrian Toon, director of a2n.

When I first started this column, we considered if a phone camera would offer pictures that were good enough for print use and, in particular, for press releases from contributors to Glass Times.

How things have changed in a very short space of time.

I was delighted that Apple launched its new iPhone range recently, and did not increase the pixel count of its sensors and instead increased the quality of the cameras and the capture software.

Now equipped with an ƒ1.6 wide angle lens and impressive low light sensor capture, the increase in quality is noticeable. Couple this with probably the greatest software and hardware package behind any camera and the results in a wide dynamic range of lighting would be difficult to replicate by a professional.

The resulting images easily surpasses any compact and medium range camera available today.

So why only 12 megapixels? For most of us this is all we need, 12MP offers a pixel picture size of 4,032 x 3,024, more than enough for any screen resolution and, at 300dpi magazine print resolution, easily up to full page A4 in size.

More pixels are just wasted for most of us. Of course, on the professional front much larger files and images have their place, but I would say any iPhone 12 would offer the size, quality and picture manipulation perfect for PR images to support copy.