Apple's phone takes beautiful photos, but is it as good as using a Fujifilm X-M5?

The iPhone 18 Pro is among the most accomplished phone cameras around, packing an array of sensors and lenses that are all capable of taking stunning images in a variety of conditions. Throw in the new creative tweaks to Apple’s Photographic Styles and the iPhone 18 Pro becomes a formidable partner to serious photographers.

But how does it compare to an actual camera? To see why you’d pick one over the other, I took the iPhone 18 Pro on some photo walks alongside Fujifilm’s X-M5, a compact-sized mirrorless camera with interchangeable lenses and a host of filmic profiles to choose from.

This isn’t designed to be a direct comparison between each specific model — after all, a phone has other advantages beyond a camera, some of which I’ll come to later. I’m not going to pixel peep at ultrafine details nor estimate which has the technically best dynamic range. This is more about which allows you to be more creative and more engaged in your image-taking and what each one offers.

With the iPhone 16 Pro Apple brought its Photographic Styles with the grid-like tool for adjusting the color tones and shadow depth for each of the looks. It was a huge boon to iPhone photographers who want to shoot with a specific look without having to manually edit each image after the fact. Apple took that further on the 18 Pro by bringing in more advanced tools, including the ability to add image grain and bloom to your images and giving manual control over white balance.

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