Go read this analysis of the new iPhone SEs AI-powered depth camera system

Unlike most phones released these days, Apple’s new iPhone SE has just one 12-megapixel rear camera lens. But it turns out that one camera is still pretty good, at least in well-lit situations, my colleague Dieter Bohn found in his iPhone SE review.

For portrait photos, the iPhone SE’s camera uses machine learning to estimate depth of field, and Ben Sandofsky, one of the developers of mobile photography app Halide, took a closer look at how at how portrait photos taken by the SE’s single camera actually work.

The key feature of the iPhone SE’s portrait mode is that can do something called “monocular depth estimation,” which is enabled by the iPhone SE’s A13 Bionic processor (the same processor in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro). That...

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