Moving to 5x zoom suddenly changed the whole equation. And well, we must confess we have not quite seen anything like this on a phone camera. Yes, we have seen much better zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but with great zoom generally came a loss of speed. Shots of moving objects tended to be a little blurry. The iPhone 15 Pro Max, however, was being able to track the eagle very well and giving us a remarkably clean view for a phone!

The shots kept getting better as the eagle came closer to us, And what kept surprising us was the relative absence of blur. Let's get this straight - this was an eagle gliding in the open sky about 40 feet away from us and we were snapping it with a phone camera with no dedicated proper long barrelled telephoto lens. We were shooting without changing any settings. This was auto mode, None of these shots are edited. At all.

There were some shots in which we could actually see the texture of the wings and the beak and even the eyes of the eagle. We were tempted to zoom in a little more but stuck to the 5x optical zoom. What surprised us was that almost no shot was wasted. We literally just had to point and shoot and the iPhone did the rest. It was instantaneous and the results were - by phone camera standards - astonishing.