Video: Just how far has iPhone camera performance come in 19 years?

Smartphone photography has come a long way since the earliest days of the Apple iPhone, but (surprise, surprise) the journey hasn’t always been as dramatic as marketing might suggest.

When Apple released its first iPhone way back in 2007, the camera was basic at best, offering just two megapixels and limited image quality.

Really, it wasn’t until the iPhone 4 in 2010 and the iPhone 4S a year later that Apple began pushing more seriously into imaging, lifting resolution to five and then eight megapixels. But like all small sensor devices, it's when lighting drops that they begin to show their flaws.

In bright daylight, even the older devices iPhones (and other smartphones for that matter) performed reasonably well. But as light dropped, that's where things started to get funky.

However as larger sensors, faster lenses and increasingly sophisticated image processing software transformed what phones could achieve, those issues started to fade away.

A major turning point came with the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016, which was the first to introduce dual cameras and optical zoom, signalling Apple’s shift toward making their devices more versatile.

More recently, tech creator Marques Brownlee compared multiple generations of iPhones side by side. His findings suggest that while improvements in sharpness, dynamic range and colour science are real, they are often subtle in everyday scenes.

“Differences are in the details for sure,” he said, noting that these nuances can be difficult to see, particularly on social media.

That sentiment that in good light at least the results were minimal was echoed by viewers. “So I’ve been upgrading my phone for nothing. Yet every year I hear from YouTubers that we got generational leap,” [sic] one commenter wrote.

It’s not just the hardware doing the heavy lifting, either.

The software side has come a long way, from the iPhone’s early point-and-shoot simplicity to today's full ecosystem of apps offering manual controls, RAW shooting and pro-level tools, many of which are AI-powered.

Nearly two decades on, smartphone cameras are seriously capable, not because of one giant leap, but really from years of small, steady improvements.