
Zoom level indicator: When you use the traditional pinch-to-zoom approach, the zoom button shows the zoom level. In portrait orientation, dragging it to the left increases zoom and dragging it to the right reduces it. The button doesn’t move when you switch orientations, so in landscape orientation, dragging it down increases the zoom and dragging it up reduces it. Incremental zoom control: Place a finger on the button and drag to move the circular slider between 1x and 10x zoom, in increments of 0.1. If you’re on an oddball zoom level, like 7.4x, a quick tap takes you back to 1x. 1x/2x zoom toggle: Tap the button to switch between 1x and 2x. We’ve recently learned that not everyone realizes what this zoom button can do. To address that, Apple enhanced the Camera app on those models with an additional way of zooming, a visible zoom button in the viewfinder, above the shutter button. (As Glenn Fleishman notes at Macworld, the iPhone might use digital zoom regardless of zoom level, depending on the conditions). That’s because those models sport dual cameras that support 2x optical zoom-at any level other than 1.0 or 2.0 you’re using digital zoom that trades zoom level for picture quality.
However, the zoom level can be hard to control precisely, which becomes an issue on the “big” iPhones-the iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone XS, and the iPhone XS Max. In all iPhones, when you’re taking a photo with the Camera app, you can zoom by putting two fingers on the viewfinder and moving them apart-the traditional pinch-to-zoom. #1657: A deep dive into the innovative Arc Web browser.#1658: Rapid Security Responses, NYPD and industry standard AirTag news, Apple's Q2 2023 financials.#1659: Exposure notifications shut down, cookbook subscription service, alarm notification type proposal, Explain XKCD.
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