Tech Review: The iPhone 14 Plus shines with its excellent display and cameras

Its 6.7-inch display is stunning. Apple’s custom-designed OLED high-resolution panel has a very high level of brightness (800 nits) and a high resolution: 2778 by 1284 pixel resolution at 458 pixels per inch depth.

Apple calls this the Super Retina XDR display.

This large display is very handy if you have reached the age where you need to hold the phone away from your face to read text – like me. The larger display means larger fonts for easily reading web pages, emails, and messages.

The display also features a very high contrast of 2,000,000: 1 ratio for a true black display and HDR experience, allowing you to enjoy viewing photos and videos in more realistic colours. When you view HDR photos and videos, the iPhone 14 Puls display can push the brightness up to 1200 nits for a true-to-life viewing experience.

You don’t have to worry that the large display and high brightness will quickly drain its battery. Apple says the iPhone 14 Plus has the best battery life ever for an iPhone.

During the test, I found that its battery comfortably lasted more than a day. By Apple’s own rating, the battery can play 26 hours of video, 100 hours of audio playback, or 20 hours of streaming video from Apple TV, YouTube, or other online services.

The battery also charges fast. It can be charged up to 50% in 35 minutes using an optional 20W adapter.

During the test, I found the iPhone 14 Plus has impressive performance. Video playbacks played smoothly. Photo displaying and web renditions were fast. Photo-taking and editing also had an impressive performance.

The impressive performance is credited to Apple’s A15 Bionic chip with a six-core CPU, five-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine processor.

The six-core CPU is made of two performance cores and four efficiency cores that work together to handle everyday tasks and demand workloads.

The five-core GPU delivers 18% faster performance for graphic-intensive gameplay and high-performance games, compared to a previous model.

The 16-core Neural Engine is capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second to provide fast machine learning, such as advanced text-to-speech on Siri and on-device processing of directions in maps as well as scene recognition in photo taking.

I found during the test that iPhone 14 Plus captured beautiful photos with its dual-camera system at the back and took beautiful selfies with its front TrueDepth camera. The machine-learning capability of the chip allows iPhone 14 Plus to properly select scene modes for photos.

The back dual-camera system has a 12MP main camera with a 26mm-equivalent focal length and a 12MP ultra-wide camera with a 13mm-equivalent focal length. The main camera comes with a bright f/1.5 aperture seven-element lens with sensor-shift optical image stabilisation while the ultra-wide camera uses an f/2.4 aperture with a 120-degree field of view, and a five-element lens with 2x optical zoom.

When you use the camera system of the iPhone 14 Plus for the first time, it will ask you to select one of five styles – standard, rich contrast, vibrant, warm, and cool. You can change the style whenever you want to try new ones.

I tried taking scenery photos with a rich contrast style and found that the camera captured them with a high dynamic range and good details in both dark and bright regions.

The main camera has better low-light performance thanks to its larger sensor, larger 1.9micrometer pixels, a faster f/1.5 aperture, which has 49% improvement in low light, and sensor-shift OIS.

The iPhone 14 Plus also uses Photonic Engine to process photos for optimised quality. The Photonic Engine dramatically improves photos taken in mid to low-light scenes, like indoors or right before the sun sets. Photonic Engine builds on the powerful computational photography capabilities of iPhone. It enhances the image pipeline by applying Deep Fusion, which is Apple’s image processing system, earlier in the process. Deep Fusion uses a powerful Neural Engine to take the best parts of multiple images on a pixel-by-pixel basis and combine them into an image that increases dynamic range and brings out extraordinary detail in low light, for example. Photonic Engine provides up to 2.5x better low-light performance for photos on the new Main camera and up to 1.8x better low-light performance on the new front camera.

The iPhone 14 Plus supports 5G and comes with Smart Data mode, which will switch to LTE (4G) and save your battery life automatically when you don’t need 5G speeds. The new smartphone also supports eSIM so you don’t have to deal with a physical SIM card anymore.

The iPhone 14 Plus also comes with safety features that hopefully you do not have to use – Crash Detection and Emergency SOS via satellite.

The smartphone has a new dual-core accelerometer that is able to detect the high g-forces typically experienced in severe crashes. When a crash is detected, it can automatically dial emergency services and play a voice loop notifying of the crash and providing a location.

With the Emergency SOS via satellite, the iPhone 14 can use custom antennas to directly connect to a satellite when you don’t have access to a cellular or wi-fi connection so you can seek help. It can also update your location in the Find My app, using the satellite connection.

The iPhone Plus 14 doesn’t have a 3.5mm conventional port for connecting wired headphones so you need to use Bluetooth headphones, like AirPods Pro. The smartphone played high-quality music via the AirPods Pro wireless earphones, I found.

During the test, I upgraded iPhone 14 Plus’ operating system to iOS 16.2 with a lot of new and improved features, including a new app called Freeform and Apple Music Sing feature.

Freeform is a new app for working with friends or colleagues on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It provides a flexible canvas that let us add file images and provides drawing tools that let you sketch anywhere on the canvas.

Apple Music Sing lets you adjust vocals in millions of songs available in Apple Music streamed music service so that you can sing along and it also provides beat-by-beat lyrics.

Apple iPhone 14 Plus with 128GB storage retails for 37,900 baht, 256 GB for 41,900 baht, and 512 GB for 50,900 baht.

Key specs:

OS: iOS 16.2

Chip: A15 Bionic chip with 6‑core CPU with 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores, 5‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine

Capacity: 128GB/ 256GB/ 512GB

Display: 6.7-inch Super Retina XDR display (2778 x 1284 pixels)

Back cameras: 12MP main: 26mm, f/1.5 aperture; and 12MP ultra-wide: 13mm, f/2.4 aperture, 120-degree field of view

Front camera: 12MP TrueDepth Camera with f/1.9 aperture lens

Battery: Video playback: up to 26 hours, audio playback: up to 100 hours,

Size: 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.80mm

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