All indications are that the iPhone 16 will have a “DSLR button,” an idea that never caught on in mobile phones.

The iPhone 16 is just around the corner. We’ll meet them next Monday, September 9, and among the many new features, there’s one that’s particularly eye-catching for mobile photography enthusiasts: a dedicated camera button.

This speaks about a physical button called the “Grab Button” which would replicate, for example, the two-stage shutter button on a DSLR camera. If you press halfway, the image will be focused, and to take a photo, you have to press all the way down.

A button that is not new at all

The system has been with us all our lives in regular cameras, but it never really caught on in mobile phones, and some manufacturers have been banking on it for a long time.

Manufacturers like Sony have been including it in some of their handsets for years, and we have a good example of this in the Sony Xperia 1 III, which we reviewed in the summer of 2021.

From this analysis, it became clear that Sony’s implementation had two problems. First, the camera app didn’t have a touch-sensitive shutter button, so photos had to be taken using the physical shutter button.

Secondly, the placement of this button was suitable for landscape photography, but It was inconvenient to take vertical photographs.something important in the era of vertical photos and videos on Instagram.

Sony continues to bet on this dedicated camera button: the recent Sony Xperia 1 VI, the successor to the generation mentioned above, has retained it. It provides a pleasant experience and is complemented by an updated app that again features a touch capture button.

And yet, Sony’s high-end mobile phones continue to fail despite their superior advanced mobile photography capabilities (including a two-step shutter button), perhaps because the vast majority of users They just need a good automatic mode that won’t make their life difficult..

Mobile photography enthusiasts have interesting candidates in these Sony Xperias for the manual controls offered by DSLRs, but for the general public these capabilities are They are usually overwhelming..

This is actually one of the biggest problems with the iPhone’s physical shutter button. Hopefully, Apple will continue to offer equally good – or even better – results with its automatic photo mode, which is always activated via an on-screen app button.

So the physical shutter button shouldn’t be a deception for the vast majority of iPhone users, who value these devices precisely for the good photos they can take with a simple touch of the screen.

Tactile image magnification

There are even rumors that the same capture button on the iPhone 16 will be sensitive to touchwhich means it can also be used to zoom by moving your finger to one end or the other of the button, as if it were some sort of invisible dial.

If confirmed, this option could certainly make the use of said button particularly interesting, as precise zoom control from the screen is often less than ideal: the well-known two-finger pinch gesture works in many scenarios, but it’s not particularly suitable when it comes to precise zoom control.

This is something that Xiaomi, for example, has curiously implemented in its Xiaomi 14 Ultra. These phones do not have a separate physical shutter button, but you can buy a case – the Xiaomi 14 Ultra Photography Kit – that adds this component.

In fact, this case not only has a physical two-step button, but it also has a physical disk to control scalingIndependent video recording button and 1500mAh auxiliary battery, extending the life of the mobile phone by 23%.

What Apple offers seems to be very different from what Xiaomi offers with this case or Sony with its high-end mobile phones: here, theoretically, we have the best of all worlds.

In theory, this would give users access to both of the iPhone’s “old-fashioned” photography modes, while Apple is going one step further and offering an interesting option for enthusiasts of the manual modes that have always been an important distinguishing feature of traditional high-end camera modes.

Bet on a Photo for Life

Here’s another additional thought: Google and its Pixel 9 revolutionized mobile photography, but they did so with the preeminent role that artificial intelligence can play in the process of “reimagining” our reality.

Apple doesn’t seem to want to go in that direction, at least for now, and they continue to take the wink, wink approach of traditional photography and video They continue to be the absolute protagonists.

This is evidenced, for example, by the fact that the iPhone 15 Pro/Max allowed you to connect a hard drive to the USB-C port and record Apple ProRes video in LOG up to 4K 30 FPS.

These mobile phones have long been planned to become small portable recording studios, and the hypothetical two-stage or phase shutter button only strengthens this calling to also become a benchmark in mobile photography without artificial intelligence and algorithms that still take over all the work.

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