Rene Ritchie talking on how Apple does camera:
As shown on 60 Minutes, Apple has a team of several hundred people working on the camera system. They look at hundreds of thousands of images of every scene type, in every scenario, to ensure everything from the sensor to the processor to the software is making the right decision every step of the way.
The goal is to capture an image as true-to-life as possible, with colors as natural as possible, and to make sure it looks accurate not just on the iPhone’s display, but on your friend’s or family member’s phone, on a computer’s display or a television’s display, and on any prints you may choose to make.
The software including what Apple gets out of the Bayer CMOS sensor has to be the reason the iPhone can truly begin to compete with almost any fixed lens digital camera on the market today. If you shoot on auto settings all the time, then it may be the best camera on the market for you. Obviously, it's hard to compare any fixed lens camera to an interchangeable lens camera but the convenience, compactness, and output of the iPhone definitely places it in a category of its own.
Rene quoting Lisa Bettany, renowned iPhone photographer and co-founder of Camera+:
The one major hurdle of the iPhone camera has always been the fixed aperture which hinders our creative control. I’d be thrilled to see adjustable aperture in the next iPhone version.
She hits this nail on. While it may not come in the iPhone 7, it's definitely the gap that needs to be closed to really unlock the ability to create certain types of photography. That being said, the images are pretty darn sharp for a f2.2 fixed aperture lens.
It'll be interesting to see what news there is on Wednesday.