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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

What's the camera like on this one? I owned the last-gen SE and it's camera was the main reason that I upgraded to the 13 Mini. It was truly awful -- it made my Pixel 2 XL's camera seem WAY, WAY better than what the SE had.

Looking at the press release, I don't see anything about any "new" camera tech. The lens looks pretty similar too. Is anybody able to confirm if this is the same camera as the last gen model?

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It’s in the sub-headline, and there’s an entire section about it:

    iPhone SE features an all-new camera system powered by A15 Bionic, with a 12-megapixel ƒ/1.8 aperture Wide camera that offers incredible computational photography benefits, including

12-megapixel ƒ/1.8 is an unchanged camera from 2020 SE. They are running with iPhone 8 cameras for another few years and trying to fix the image quality with software.

Awesome, thank you! I must have missed it while scrolling through the swoopy animations.

Agreed, everything else I love about my current SE, but the camera was near zero improvement over my 6. If it’s single lens it’s likely to still be a significant shortcoming. They try to workaround it with better image processing algos but it’s not the same.

Isn't it basically the same lens + sensor package from the iPhone 8? If so, it's a bit long in the tooth, and no amount of computational power on the A15 chip is going to overcome its shortcomings.

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