The iPhone 16e’s camera reminds me of much, much simpler times

It’s been a while since I’ve used a phone with a single camera on the back — not since Apple launched its last iPhone SE (2022). Before that, though, it had been much longer, probably since about the iPhone 7. Although Apple stuck with its single-camera setup for a long time, the rest of the smartphone world evolved. Two rear lenses became three, which sometimes even four. But now, the count is back to one. Apple’s iPhone 16e takes me back to the days when phone cameras were simple, and I both love and hate it.

The idea of smartphone cameras — at least in my mind — back before they became fancy and complicated was that you could pull your phone from your pocket, snap a picture, and put it away. You didn’t have to mess around with zoom too much because you simply couldn’t. If your subject didn’t frame up nicely within the limited zoom range, you just had to capture what you could and hope for the best — I attended many a concert in high school and college this way, even if the photos I took now look like poorly lit garbage when I go back to them.

In many ways, the iPhone 16e captures that same idea, just with a solid leap in quality. I feel pretty good about pulling it out of my pocket, opening the 48MP Fusion camera, and grabbing a good enough shot before putting it back in my pocket. With the increased resolution, it’s much easier to trust Apple’s single camera when I have to crop in on a subject later because my framing wasn’t quite right. As needed, I’ve even been willing to punch into the iPhone 16e’s 2x “optical” zoom (a sensor crop isn’t the same as having two cameras in one, Apple) or go as far as 4x digital zoom without too much of a drop in quality. Obviously, this camera can’t reach out as far as Apple’s multi-lens flagships, but it’s not useless for zooming in, either.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that the iPhone 16e uses a 26mm-equivalent focal length and f/1.6 aperture, just like the flagship iPhone 16. It’s not exactly the same setup — the midranger’s sensor is quite a bit smaller, as are its megapixels — but it’s paired to an A18 chip that packs much better image processing capabilities than the last time I used a single-camera smartphone. It’s better able to separate human subjects in portrait mode, bring details out of night mode shots thanks to pixel binning, and process spatial audio when you’re shooting videos — all things I wanted more from while reviewing the iPhone SE (2022).

However, as soon as you move on from the basics, the limitations of Apple’s single-camera phone become more apparent, and it’s not all down to the hardware. Many of the things introduced on the flagship iPhone 16 series are simply not here, and some go-to features that I’ve come to expect from phones at almost any price point are missing, too — like the ability to take pictures of pets using portrait mode. Yes, that’s right. I currently have a foster puppy, and I can’t get photos of him with that sweet artificial bokeh that might help him find a permanent home.

Strangely enough, the Photos app will let me use the Look Up feature on him, and it will attempt to identify his breed, but it won’t acknowledge him for portraits — go figure. This seems like exactly the type of image segmentation task that the A18 chip should excel at. I guess it has more to do with the presence of a secondary sensor than I expected, or Apple wants to reserve this feature for its flagship models for some reason.

I also find myself longing for Apple’s customizable Photographic Styles for a pretty similar reason. They’re not totally gone from the iPhone 16e — you can still swipe through about a dozen color profiles — you just can’t tweak the tone and warmth once you find one you like. I suppose that’s more of a pro photographer feature, too? Not long ago, I wouldn’t have cared about the presence or absence of camera filters (I thought that chapter of Instagram history was long behind us), but I’ve come to enjoy making photos feel a little bit more personal, especially now that Samsung is using Galaxy AI for a similar purpose.

And yet, the one thing I don’t miss on the iPhone 16e — not even a little — is the Camera Control. Even though I liked having a manual camera control on an iPhone at first, its usefulness quickly waned, eventually becoming not much more than an extra button for cases to be designed around. I’d occasionally use it to swap between Photographic Styles, but I can count on one hand the number of times I used the Camera Control to snap an actual photo, mostly because I felt like squeezing low on the phone caused it to shake more in my hand.

Now, with it absent from the iPhone 16e, I’m back to holding and using the camera interface like I had for so many years, either tapping the shutter button on the display or squeezing the volume button when needed. It’s a much more instinctive camera experience, at least for me, and I wouldn’t mind keeping it on the next generation of flagship iPhones.

While it’s far from a perfect camera phone, the iPhone 16e has reminded me of one thing — if you don’t get the shot, it doesn’t matter what camera you’re using. Sure, I would love to capture every memory and experience just as I saw it, but I know that’s not the case. I would love to be able to freeze time to pinch in and out on a subject to frame it up just right, but it doesn’t work that way. Both my single-camera iPhone 16e and 11-month-old foster puppy have seen fit to remind me of that.

But they’ve also reminded me that you have to live as close to the moment as you can, either because you’re going to miss the photo you want or because your dog is going to grab a napkin, a chicken bone, or step in another dog’s poop for the fifth time this week, and you’re going to have to battle him for it. And, when you slow down and look at life that way, it’s nice to have a camera that you don’t have to think all that much about. It’s the same reason I love my Fujifilm X100V and tend to take it with me for more trips than my much more capable (and larger) Fujifilm X-T5.

Anyway, I probably owe you some dog tax after talking about my boy Chorizo throughout this entire article, so here are a few snaps I grabbed with the iPhone 16e:

Not bad, right? They won’t win any National Geographic awards, but they let me play with a sweet (but anxious) boy all week, keeping him out of a crowded shelter. Stay tuned for more iPhone 16e camera samples when I finish my full review, but I’m not sure I’ll get many cuter than this set.