Apple Promises Fix f…
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A camera bug on the new iPhones is producing photos with small blacked-out portions.
CNN Underscored’s Henry Casey spotted the issue while testing the iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro cameras. He took the phones to a concert and snapped pictures of the band on stage using an 8x zoom. However, in the resulting shots, some portions of the LED screen behind the artists were blacked out. The black boxes appeared on one out of every 10 photos.
Apple told Casey that it’s “something that can happen in very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera. Apple has identified a fix and will be releasing it in an upcoming software update.”
The new iPhones launch tomorrow with iOS 26. In PCMag’s review of the iPhone Air, the single 48MP rear camera delivered excellent results with its 1x and 2x optical zoom. However, not having the zoom range you get on the Pro models was a drawback. “Sure, you can zoom up to 10x via digital cropping, but it’s not pretty, despite the magic Apple dusted into the imaging pipeline to clean things up,” PCMag’s Eric Zeman notes.
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In our review of the iPhone 17 Pro Max, Eric finds that, “Shots zoomed as far as 8x look right, but digital zooming past about 10x starts to lose detail and resolution.” Stay tuned for our iPhone 17 Pro review.
According to an early preorder estimate, the Air is the least popular new iPhone. The iPhone 17 Pro Max, 17 Pro, and the base iPhone 17, on the other hand, have seen a 25% spike in preorder demand compared with last year’s iPhone 16 series.
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