With the rise of AI-generated content I would actually love a camera with no post-processing by default and a watermarking system that proves the picture is authentic. I can see Apple going that way eventually.
Leica and Sony offer this as “Content Credentials” and anti-forgery digital signatures done on camera. It’s also been standard for many years for digital cameras used in criminal evidence procedures, Olympus tough series IIRC.
Me I just switched back to film. It’s about a buck a picture but I like the results I get, I’d rather have 30 photos than 300 to look through anyway.
Apple is apparently working on the latter, although it'll be opt-in and it's unclear whether it will also reduce the processing (I hope it does!): https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/10/ios-27-apple-reference-...
How does that watermark feature work if you can just point the camera at an AI-generated image?
On Android, you can use OpenCamera. Optionally save in RAW and process in desktop RAW software.
Alternatively, buy a mirrorless or DSLR with some decent lenses.
If it's watermarked then it's by definition inauthentic. Watermarking is in-band signal manipulation.
Telling if a photo or a video is "true" is the same as telling if the written text is "true". You can not tell it by analyzing characters / words in a text, or pixels in a video.
You should analyze the subject who is providing that text / video and decide for yourself, whether you trust that subject or not.
E.g. "Elon Musk is 10 feet tall" - are you reading it on an anonymous X account or on a Business Insider social account? An attached photo of Elon Musk being 10 feet tall does not make a difference.
Eh, there are plenty of third party camera apps which do that (See: Halide and their Prozess Zero). I doubt a built-in one will go that way.
Every dedicated camera is like this, more so if you shoot in raw.
There's also a lot of confusion around the processing here. The iPhone is mostly just taking multiple pictures and stacking them on top of each other to make up for the poor performance of the small hardware, denoising, and then applying a mask to subjects to lift shadows and adjust skin tones. This is the same kind of edit a photographer would do in Lightroom. It's not straight up AI generating content in the image.
Sadly Android phones are willing to pull cheap tricks to show better numbers or look better in some comparative youtube video so they pull this stuff.