After announcing its new iPhone 5 yesterday, Apple published a gallery of full-res sample photos showing the updated camera’s quality. Although the specs haven’t really changed, Apple says that the updated sensor and processor leads to better photographs. What better way to test these claims than to compare resulting photos side by side?
Luckily for us, DPReview has the droids comparison we’re looking for. When Apple’s official sample images were posted yesterday, DPReview product manager Scott Everett realized that he had taken an iPhone 4S photo that was nearly identical to one of the images — the one of the coastline in Big Sur, California. Read more…
Back in 2011, it was discovered that iPhones, iPods, and iPads running iOS 5 had a hidden panorama feature that was built into the operating system but not ordinarily available through the devices. Methods were discovered for unlocking the feature, which we all assumed was simply a half-baked feature that wasn’t ready for release at the time.
It seems that Apple engineers have been busy polishing the feature in the 10 months since then, as the panorama feature was announced yesterday at the iPhone 5′s unveiling. For those of you who are content with your iOS 5 device, here’s some good news for you: iPhone 4S users will get the new panorama mode as well when iOS 6 is rolled out on September 19th, 2012. Read more…
Marketing and customer loyalty are two powerful things. They can make minor improvements in gadgets seem great, and major advancements to-die-for. In the world of photography, many camera owners feel strong allegiances to the brand they use, fiercely defending it as their own, and even going on the offensive to belittle other photographers who shoot under a different banner. This kind of customer loyalty does strange things to how the “fanboys” perceive the quality of their camera gear. Read more…
Earlier today, Apple announced its new iPhone 5, which features a camera that’s nearly identical to the one found in the 4S. Soon after the announcement, Apple put up the official product page for the phone, which includes a gallery of sample photographs shot using the iPhone 5. Unfortunately, none of the shots show low-light environments, which would have allowed us to gawk at the power of the camera’s new and improved noise-killing processor. For now, we’ll just have to settle for these generic shots showing what the 3264×2448 images look like when they pop out of the camera. Read more…
Apple is on stage right now announcing its new iPhone 5, and has just revealed the details of the smartphone’s camera. It’s pretty much the same camera as the one found inside the iPhone 4S, except they made the whole thing “thinner” (the iPhone 5 is 18% thinner than its predecessor). You’ll find a slightly improved backside-illuminated sensor that shoots the same 8-megapixel photos at 3264×2448 resolution, and the same 5-element lens with a f/2.4 aperture. Read more…
What would happen if Apple made a DSLR? Web video artist Adam Sacks thinks it would be a hit with iPhone users who use their phones for the sole purpose of taking pictures of food, applying filters to them, and then sharing them online. He created this humorous parody of an Apple commercial in which Greg Mansfield, the “Vice President of iPhone Product Design”, introduces the iPhone 5. The new phone is reinvented as a DSLR to make everyone’s life easier, and features a single app: Camera. Read more…
A new patent application by Apple is showing off some of the technology we may be finding in the next generation camera. The application, which you can read in its entirety here, mentions a few new features, among them the ability to select multiple focus points, allowing the the phone to take over and adjust the aperture, exposure and even post-process to get the best possible picture for those points.
A few other notable features mentioned in the patent include motion tracking for focus, automatic sharpening of key areas, and the possibility of a dedicated image processor (instead of the image processing hardware built into the A5 chip?). Of course we can’t be sure that these advances will make their way into the next iPhone or that they’ll see the light of day at all, but just the fact that Apple is taking this much of an interest in improving an already good smartphone camera seems to bode well for the phoneotographers among us.
Here’s a bit of photo humor to start off the day: Jeremiah Warren made this satirical video imagining what it would be like if Apple announced an “iPhone 5 iDSLR”:
Who really needs photography skills when you have such an incredible device? You don’t really have to think about it. Just press the button.
What’s sad is that some people will inevitably believe that this is a real product, and of those people, some will be disappointed when they find out this is fake.
What you see here may be the first leaked photograph shot with the upcoming iPhone 5. The EXIF data claims it was shot with the iPhone 4, but other EXIF details indicate otherwise. Although the leaked image was cropped, the original size of the image was 3264×2448 (roughly 8MP), the rumored resolution found on the next iPhone. The lens info was recorded as “4.3mm f/2.4″, more similar to a point-and-shoot than then 3.85mm f/2.8 lens found on the iPhone 4. Finally, the geotag info in the photo shows it was taken at 37.33216667,-122.03033333 — the location of Apple’s headquarters. Check out the full-res file with EXIF intact here. Read more…
If you think the 5-megapixel sensor found on the iPhone 4 is good, wait till you see the camera found on the next iPhone — it’s reportedly going to be a 8-megapixel sensor made by Sony. The Street wrote back in 2010 that the next version of the iPhone to arrive in 2011 would pack an 8-megapixel Sony sensor rather than the 5-megapixel OmniVision one found in the current phone, and Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer seems to have confirmed that today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Read more…
