Night Video Test of iPhone 18 Pro Shows Gains, Still Trails Daylight Quality

The reviewer had originally set out to photograph portraits and test the wider aperture of the iPhone 18 Pro, then wait for darkness to see whether the extra light would shorten the duration of Night mode exposures. That plan was set aside when a cruise liner passed through Tower Bridge, described in the report as an extremely rare sight, which the reviewer treated as an opportunity to shoot night video instead.

iPhones have developed into capable cameras over several generations, but a substantial gap has persisted between daylight and night quality for both stills and video. Apple has invested heavily in low-light still photography, an effort the report says is visible in current models, helped by the addition of Night mode portraits in 2020. Computational photography underpins much of that: the phone captures a series of frames rather than a single shot and combines different exposures into one image.

Video presents a harder problem. At a minimum of 24 frames per second, and typically when recording movement, the phone has little room to capture multiple exposures of the same frame and merge them, which is why night video quality lags well behind stills. Apple continues to work on the area and night video performance has improved with each generation, according to the report. The iPhone 18 Pro gains both the annual video processing updates and a wider aperture that admits more light. The increase is less than one stop, but the report notes that for video in particular every additional photon counts.

The full clip ran more than nine minutes at normal speed. Rather than rely on the device's video stabilization for that long, the reviewer braced a mini tripod on top of a railing. The footage was sped up to ten times normal speed to bring it down to 96 seconds, with a couple of sections left at actual speed so viewers could see the careful work of the tugboats.

The result, in the reviewer's assessment, is not perfect but another step forward. Close inspection shows some detail that is rather muddy, a complaint the report treats as largely beside the point: an ordinary viewer watches a clip like this and enjoys the spectacle without objecting to the quality. Set against low-light video from a few generations ago, the report describes the difference as night and day. Night video performance is not yet where the reviewer would ideally want it, but it keeps improving generation by generation, and the report concludes that the format has reached the point of being good enough for most people to enjoy even in conditions as demanding as these.