If you’ve seen one of those flashy Apple ads that say “Shot on iPhone” and thought, “Gosh, I didn’t know my iPhone could do that,” I have some bad news for you—it can’t. Let me explain why.
When I’m not writing for MUO, I work for a megachurch as a production director, so filming and cameras are my thing. I can tell you Hollywood film crews are using gear to augment an iPhone that, for the most part, is out of reach for the rest of us. Chances are they’ve stuck a crazy-expensive lens (think $10k—$20k) over the factory lenses, they have a pricey dolly with an extra operator, and all sorts of extra add-ons most of us wouldn’t even think about.
There’s much more to filming with an iPhone than just pointing it at someone and hitting record.
iPhone Camera Sensors Are Only So Good
This part is nerdy, but stay with me. If you look carefully at a video you shot on your phone and then at a Hollywood film, you’ll notice a distinct difference in the definition or crispness of the images. Much of this has to do with sensor sizes.
What is a camera sensor? It’s the part of a camera that actually captures the light that makes up an image, which is what film used to do before digital cameras became the industry standard. Sensors are made up of individual pixels that capture light, and the number of those pixels determines the megapixel count of your image.
The size of your iPhone necessitates a very small sensor, and by very small, I mean less than a centimeter in width. Professional film camera sensors are—at a minimum—35mm wide, more than 3.5 times the size of an iPhone sensor (some even larger). So, even if your iPhone has a high megapixel count (the new iPhone 16 comes in at a whopping 48MP), Apple is cramming all those pixels into a tiny space. A larger sensor with the same megapixel count will have a crisper image simply because the pixels are larger and can capture more detail.
A Hollywood camera will always take better footage than an iPhone.
It’s Just an Ad to Make You Want an iPhone
The hard truth is that while you could in theory make a film that looks like the ad you saw (after all, they did shoot it on an iPhone), it’s just a really clever ad. If it made you want the new iPhone, the ad did its job. If it made you want to become a filmmaker, well… it did more than it was meant to.
That being said, the iPhone is a versatile tool for video conferencing, simple video capture, or live streaming. It’s a primary tool of YouTubers and TikTok influencers, but not serious filmmakers. “Shot On iPhone” ads are clever, but that’s really all they are.
