How Small a Defect Can an iPhone Detect? Sub-Millimetre Sugar Test

Someone asked how far an iPhone can really push defect detection, so instead of arguing about it in theory we ran the test on camera.

The setup is two piles of sugar, one clean and one contaminated with sub-millimetre foreign material, filmed through the iPhone Ultra Wide lens in macro mode. The question is whether the model reliably separates the two when the difference is at the edge of what a human inspector would catch.

The short answer is yes. The longer answer, including what working distance and lens choice do to the smallest detectable defect, is covered in our field of view breakdown on the blog.