iPhone 4 camera review- pros and cons
It is a truism that the best camera is the one that you have with you. That best camera just got a lot better with the introduction of the iPhone 4, leagues better than previous iPhone cameras.
The iPhone 4 main camera is never going to replace your Nikon or Canon, but it does have the advantage of always being in your pocket. It is strangely satisfying to be able to remove your cell phone from your pocket and take a photo that you are not ashamed to show around to your friends or post on the Internet. It may be especially endearing in my case, since the iPhone 4 was an upgrade form an iPhone 3G, which had a much less than stellar camera.
Just to get it out of the way, the iPhone 4 has two cameras, one facing the user and one facing away. The one that faces the user was intended primarily for FaceTime phone calls and other sorts of video conferencing, for example on Skype. I have also used it to take stealthy photos of things behind me, as sort of a semi-spy camera, but it is still a much lesser camera than the one that faces away from the user, no matter how nifty that unintended feature is.
So we are speaking here of the camera that faces away from the user. It is a 5 megapixel unit, which matches the older Sony DSC-H1 that was my most-used camera for quite some time until I upgraded to a newer model HX1. So there are enough pixels to actually do something with. The iPhone 4 main camera also has a trait that endears it to its user: generally, the photo that you get is better than the scene that you shot. It is as if it auto-Photoshops your images to give you more vibrant colors. In fact, it is reminiscent of using a polarizing filter on a film camera. What you saw was not as good as what you get.
Besides this bit of wizardry, the folks at at Apple have added a lot of bells and whistles to the camera in this iteration. The camera now has zoom, although the more you zoom the noisier the result gets, so it is truly a mixed blessing. I find myself taking pictures primarily of fairly-wide-angle landscapes, where the camera shines, and of colorful scenes that to not require a lot of close-up. As long as you stick to pictures like that, life is good. Here’s an example of a landscape:
It also does a good job at recording the little details of life that you would want to share. A lot of the meals that I cook or eat out wind up memorialized on Plurk for some reason. It may mainly be that the color wizardry worked by this phone camera does a really good job with food, and with your dining partner(s). Whatever the reason, I have been posting a lot of iPhone photos on Plurk and elsewhere, right from the phone, though they are not the best of my photos. There is no sorting and cropping required; they are photos from your phone and people recognize that.
The iPhone 4 also has a flash, although just a small LED. It provides a lot of light for such a small thing, but you’re never going to mistake it for a high-powered flash unit. Still, it does a pretty good job of illuminating the dark bits, especially indoors at night. It is surprising how much better it can make a low-light photo look. It can be set at three settings: on, off, or automatic.
Although the iPhone 4 camera is autofocus, it also provides some control for that function. Looking at the “viewfinder” which is pretty much the entire display area of the phone, you can tap your finger on any spot on the display, and that is where the camera will set it’s focus. This would be a way nifty feature for a DSLR or an up-level hobbyist camera.
The camera also has a very nifty HDR function, courtesy of the first iOS4 upgrade for the phone. HDR is a series of techniques that that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. It allows the camera to pull things out of the shadows, for example, when an image contains both very light and very dark areas. The HDR software essentially blends the best parts of three different exposures into a single photograph with a wider range of exposures than the original. This gives you a better photograph in a lot of conditions.
You don’t really have to do anything clever. Just turn HDR on with a single tap when you think you need it and the camera does the rest. You will notice a lag after the photo is taken while the HDR software makes three bracketed exposures out of the original photo, then does its magic to blend those three into a more balanced dynamic whole. This is pretty amazing stuff for a cell phone camera. The images that I have captured using HDR in difficult lighting situations have improved the end result every time, with varying degrees of success. Most of them have been significantly better than the photo would have been without HDR.
All in all, for something that fits in your pocket or purse and is more or less free with the phone, this is a very nice camera with a pretty good feature set. The camera software automatically punches up the colors and areas that you would like highlighted, making a lot of your photos look better than life. Like we said up front, this is not going to be your best camera unless it is the only one you have with you at the time, and it is amazing how often that happens. For a device that is also an MP3 player, a GPS turn-by-turn navigator, and a telephone, the iPhone 4 is a fairly remarkable camera.
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October 23rd, 2010
You can enhance the quality of the photos with the $1.99 “12.0 Mega Camera + ZOOM” application
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/12-0-mega-camera-zoom/id396358734?mt=8#