The 9.7" iPad Pro Review
by Brandon Chester on June 1, 2016 9:00 AM ESTStill Image Quality
With the iPhone SE we saw Apple bring the 12MP camera from the iPhone 6s to a $399 phone. The 9.7" iPad Pro brings it to the iPad. More specifically, it's a ~1/3" 12MP sensor with a f/2.2 aperture. The A9X SoC comes with the same ISP as Apple A9, and so we should see parity between the photo quality on the iPhone 6s, the iPhone SE, and the 9.7" iPad Pro. In my iPhone SE review I said that the camera was a substantial upgrade over the one used in the iPhone 5s. In this case the gap is even larger, with Apple moving from an 8MP sensor with 1.1-micron pixels to a 12MP sensor with 1.22-micron pixels. Not only does moving to a higher resolution sensor enable UHD video recording, but the fact that the sensor is larger with more pixels will help to improve the quality of photos in good lighting, and even more so in poor lighting. Using Apple's latest SoC is also what allows for 1080p120 slow motion video and Live Photos.
| Daytime Photography |
As I said in my iPhone SE review, there's not a lot to say about this camera because we've already seen it in the market for many months now. While it's not the absolute best sensor in a smartphone, it's by far the best one in any tablet. Apple's processing gave them a lead over the competition when they were shipping 1.1-micron 8MP sensors in iPads, and with the 9.7" Pro moving to the same camera as the iPhone 6s the leap in image quality is significant. In the day you can see improved detail. It's also possible that the optics are an improvement over those used in other iPads, as you can see proper detail capture in some areas of photos where MTF limitations caused artifacting on older iPads.
| Night Photography |
As with the iPhone SE, the 9.7" iPad Pro is equivalent to the iPhone 6s when shooting in low light. In these particular shots there's a slight different in exposure but that could simply be due to me having a bit of trouble focusing on the same area with such a large device. The overall detail is equivalent between all the devices using Apple's 12MP sensor, and when you compare the 9.7" Pro to other tablets they're in completely different classes. The competition from Google is let down by worse cameras, worse ISPs, and worse processing, to the point where you basically can't use them to take a photo in low light. The best competition I've seen for the iPads was the Tab S2. Unfortunately, Samsung only loaned that to us for a short period so I no longer have it for comparisons, but given that it was equivalent to the iPad Air 2, it's safe to say that this new iPad Pro is really without competition for camera quality.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
144 Comments
View All Comments
The Garden Variety - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
For the love of god: Stop it. Stop putting spaces between the end of your sentence or clause and your punctuation. I realize the French in particular insist on doing this because, well, they're French, but that doesn't change the fact that for written English it is completely and entirely wrong. If you want to be taken seriously, be serious. Write like you care, not like a third grader. English not your first language? Fair enough, but then consider this your first step toward being taken more seriously in your communication.Brandon Chester - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
The question mark with spaces on both sides reminds me of the conditional operator in C :)kurahk7 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Keep in mind that each of these publications only have a sample size of one, and that there are variances between the same products. Because of that, Displaymate might have received an iPad with a slightly worse calibration/panel than Anandtech and vice versa for the Surface.BadSimian - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Displaymate on the iPad Pro's screen - "It is by far the best performing mobile LCD display that we have ever tested, and it breaks many display performance records." http://www.displaymate.com/iPad_Pro9_ShootOut_1.ht...Deelron - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"Since departure of Anand, Apple product reviews look like PR marketing speech, although the tests and content itself of the review do not match the speech"Amusing since so many reviews by Anand on Apple products had the exact same refrain in the comments.
Wolfpup - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Huh? Apple's CPUs have been years ahead of the ARM stuff available for Android for...years. Swift was a nice A9+ just like Krait, but since the year after (2012) their CPUs have just been massively far ahead...and yet I STILL hear comments like this that seem completely unaware of that.zepi - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Amoled doesn't mean infinite contrast in practice, only in pitch black test environment. In real life blackest signal is (reflectance) x (ambient light), not zero. Due to this, in high ambient light new iPad has better blacks than any amoled display on the market.And actually, if we go to signal processing maths and measurements, we could start drawing comparisons from them. No one in their right mind would try to argue that 16-bit CD quality audio has infinite dynamic range, even though it is very easy to sample total silence in form of zero signal value to a musical track.
Also music volume is not considered to be infinite, but the value is compared to arbitrarily defined human hearing threshold and converted to logarithmic decibels with 0 meaning non-zero value at the lowest level human ear can measure.
One pretty reasonable comparison point for amoled contrast might be using the quantization error at lower end of the brightness. Ie: something along the lines of set brightness of display to max, display uniform pictures of gray at RGB(1,1,1), measure this brightness in lumens, divide by two (this is quantization error for lowest measurable signal) and then use this as a divisor for the highest recorded value for RGB(255,255,255). Depending on gamma, dividing by two gives wrong results, but for linear display this would be ok.
Infinitely linear displays are available ACME shop just next to frictionless bearings and other such very handy things...
UtilityMax - Monday, June 6, 2016 - link
I suspect iPad Pro is compared with the flagship android smartphones because Android tablet hardware sucks. Just have a look at the Galaxy Tab S2 or the Pixel C.tecsi - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Any chance of including iPad Air benchmark numbers as many of we iPad Air owners want to understand the performance gains we can expect.I assumed I could just look at your iPad Air 2/iPad Air reviews to get those numbers there, but apparently your benchmarks are different as the iPad Air 2 Kraken 1.1 numbers were different in the two reviews.
Please let us know if you can do this.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Unfortunately we do not have the original Air, so we are unable to generate any new numbers for it.