Ten times is as far as the iPhone Duo zooms, and at 10x Max Tech's shots of a tower and a stand of trees turn to mush next to the iPhone 18 Pro Max. The channel expected that. What surprised it after a weekend of side-by-side shooting was how often the gap showed up without any zoom at all, and how it widened as the light got worse.

Where the Pro Max pulls away

  • Portraits. The Duo blurs backgrounds less and over-sharpens faces, and several shots set to Portrait came out with no depth effect at all. There's no 4x portrait, and its 3x crop looks bad up close. The video blames the missing LiDAR sensor.
  • Focus in the dark. The Duo hunted for one to three seconds after sunset while the Pro Max locked on at once.
  • Highlights. A lamp and a bright window blew out to white on the Duo and kept their detail on the Pro Max. Max Tech calls the Duo's main sensor an iPhone 17 sensor with weaker stabilization.
  • Low light. The Pro Max's f/1.48 aperture pulls in more light, and 48MP shots at dusk show it.
  • Zoom. Even 4x looks like an old phone on the Duo, and its 10x ceiling compares with 40x on the Pro Max.

Where the Duo keeps up

  • Rear-camera selfies. With the cover screen as a viewfinder, the 1x main camera beats the Pro Max's 18MP front camera on color, detail, and natural blur, and the ultra wide fits a whole scene in.
  • Ultra wide. The two are close to identical, with sharper corners on the Duo and a better result from one two-second exposure under a bridge.
  • Night mode. Results stay similar until it gets truly dark, when the wider aperture makes the Pro Max's shots brighter.

Usability is the other complaint. The cover screen shows a cropped preview that makes framing awkward, so the channel kept unfolding the phone to shoot, which left a big slab with bars around the image. Max Tech sums up the weekend in one line.

For photos, this is just not the phone.

That matches what the iPhone Duo teardown found inside, a main sensor nearer the iPhone 17's than a Pro's, so it's the one gap software won't close. The selfie trick is the real consolation, and in Max Tech's tests it beats the Pro Max's own front camera.