In a nutshell, the camera of AnandTech’s iPhone SE review unit produced less than spectacular images. When they contacted Apple, Apple replaced the phone and AnandTech saw what everyone else is seeing, great images, especially for a camera on a $399 phone. Jump to the article and you’ll see the before and after. Clearly a huge difference in camera quality.

Here’s the curious part:

The bad news is that we still don’t exactly know what went wrong with the first unit – what I don’t doubt is confirmed is that it suffered from a manufacturing defect in the optical system of the camera.

The problem with confirming such a scenario is that it’s very unlikely that I was extremely unlucky in being the sole person receiving such a sample, as usually one-off faults like these are insanely rare, with the more likely scenario being some sort of systematic failure for a whole batch of units.

The upshot? If you get an SE and are not happy with the images, it might be that your camera is part of the same batch that went to AnandTech. Check it against the before and after images in the article. This is the first such issue I’ve heard of, so it is possible it was just a single faulty unit, though that seems unlikely.