The 48 MP bayer mode is indeed impressive, but it does not increase the spatial frequency response. I recently used it to document some color transition errors on LG OLED displays and even with the 48 MP "RAW" mode there are artifacts from the limited spatial resolution. One of the images properly captures the display sub-pixel layout, but that is taken closer to the display. Enabling/disabling "RAW" did not change the spatial resolution of the photos.
If you take a photo of a subject that is closer than 7.8 inches, you're no longer using the main camera on the 14 Pro. It automatically switches to the ultrawide camera and crops in to show the same field of view. I suspect that is happening to you in some cases, but you're unaware, based on the fact that you didn't mention anything about this limit.
The 48MP camera has the same color spatial resolution as a 12MP camera, but it has 48MP of monochromatic spatial resolution. Humans aren't as sensitive to color resolution as they are to spatial resolution in general. This is why the "2x" mode on the 14 Pro look great compared to what you might expect based on your comment. The 2x crop only has "3MP" of color resolution, but the 12MP of spatial resolution from the 2x crop makes it perfectly usable.
For your specific use case, the ultrawide camera may work fine as a "macro" lens, depending on the size of the pixels you're trying to capture. A real macro lens on an interchangeable lens camera would obviously do better.
Ah that would be my problem. I took zoomed photos to avoid lens distortion. The ultrawide would have been a better option.
This wasn't meant to be a nice dataset, it was just something I quickly tried to document my observation to a single other human. I would have been more careful if I expected to share it more widely.
I think if you disable automatic Macro Mode in the camera app settings and make sure it's off when you take the photo (flower icon that appears should be grey not yellow) it avoids this. Though it seems like the other cameras can't actually focus at this distance.
Note that in the real world it's going to have much less than 48MP of monochromatic spatial resolution due to aberrations.
Even if the lens was operating at the limit of physics, you'd get a 2 micron first ring of the airy disk at 500nm, which is bigger than the size of the pixels. It can help a bit to have pixels smaller than the smallest detail the lens can resolve, but at the same time the lens isn't operating at the physical limit, so there is probably only a small increase in spatial resolution.
I've been playing block the sensor with that little IR lidar thing or whatever it is beside the lenses same size as the flash but is a dark spot. I was trying to photograph some VVT solenoid channels with illumination creeping out the ports and it got the camera into a cycle of switching lenses. I covered the sensor and the toggling ceased so I could focus the photo and get a good image.
interesting, so the flower icon now shows up on the bottom left. Is the brightness/exposure slider not available in macro mode? Seems like when I spot touch a region in the photo to drive brightness exposure I exit macro mode. Looks however like I can still do the exposure slider in the control menu things just not on the screen with the spot touch technique. What is that spot touch thing known as anyways?
I've been using the Halide app to take most of my daylight shots in 48mp HEIC mode (which has the benefit of being 5-15kb per photo).
The main advantage to me is that the result is much less affected by Apple's always-on edge-sharpening processing. The effective "resolution" of the processing artifacts is higher.
In previous iPhones if you take a photo of a bunch of leaves on a tree it's almost like it tries to draw a little sharpened outline around each one, which looks like a watercolor mess if you zoom in at all and doesn't capture what your eye sees.
With the 48mp compressed shots I find landscapes and trees look much more natural and in general you can crop and zoom into photos further before the detail is lost in the processing mess.
The 48MP sensor still has 48MP of monochromatic resolution, but it only has 12MP of effective color resolution. You'll still see fine details, but the colors are not as high resolution as the details. This is rarely a problem, given the way the human eye processes color.
I'm not an optics expert, but I expect that the physical system's spatial bandwidth is much higher than the sensor's bandwidth. That is to say, if there were more light sensing elements I think the spatial bandwidth would be higher.
I don't think the artifacts are directly from aliasing but rather an artifact of software interpolation.
This is generally not the case here, if the lens was physically perfect it could not resolve two points closer than two pixels as per the Rayleigh criterion.
https://imgur.com/gallery/amP2lR4