My wife and I got a pair of new phones about a month ago (15 Plus and a 15 Pro). We are trying to figure out if we are crazy or not.

Comparing pictures of our kids from our phones (12 mini’s) to these new phones, we notice a huge decrease in sharpness and detail in faces. With the 12 mini’s, you could count eye lashes … and achieving a good focus on the face was effortless in most any light level, even with active toddlers running around. With these new phones, both struggle to capture focus on faces. It looks fine up until the photos are captured, and what gets saved is ALWAYS blurry. No counting eyelashes! At first glance the photos look ok, but zooming in you see that there is reduced detail/sharpness.

The bizarre thing is that it happens with both our phones (that have different cameras) and the problem disappears when we take photos of other things…no problem focusing with great sharpness on a chair or lamp or cup. This blurry/grainy thing only happens with faces.

Are we crazy? Anyone else have this problem? I have already chatted with Apple for hours, and while they acknowledge our photos look blurry, the solution is mail them back to ‘be repaired’.

  • Opening-Environment8OPBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Sounds like exactly what we have going on. Thanks for the reply.

    I’ve called twice now. We share screens, they see the pictures, they acknowledge it doesn’t look right. They also didn’t admit to any known software or hardware issues. They said it could be as simple as dust inside the devices.

    The options they offered are:

    • send the phones back to be repaired. This takes a week or so. Costs nothing other than not having phones.
    • express replacement costs 29$ a phone, they just send a new device to replace these ones.

    I am not sure what to do. We don’t live by an Apple Store or Best Buy to get a hands on opinion. I just worry that going through the replacement or fixing process will just yield the same photo results we have now.

    Does anyone have good experience with 15’s taking crisp photos of people ? I can’t imagine this would have been an issue on every phone based on the glowing reviews