Here's a quick follow up to my review of the iPhone 4s Camera from last week. There has finally been a few days with good weather and more importantly good light here in Ireland over the past week so I had a chance to give it a work out in descent conditions. As I mentioned in the previous review, good light makes the world of difference with the iPhone Camera (when using it as a straight camera). Colours are much punchier, but more importantly, the correct colour. The one thing I have found is that black levels are quite set up, i.e. blacks aren't quite black. However it's important to point out that I'm looking at these on a fully calibrated display and it often shows more detail in the blacks than you would normally see. If you are looking at it on a normal computer you wouldn't notice. Either way it's an easy fix. So, on to the pictures...
So, this isn't the most artistic image in the world, but it has a it of strong colours so you can see how well the iPhone 4s camera handles it. Blues are rich and reds are vibrant, and the detail is suite strong. I tweaked the blacks slightly in Aperture to compensate for the issue I mentioned above.
This is another shot that has lots of rich colour. It was a little cloudy at this point but it handled it pretty well.
Here, you can see how the camera doesn't like shadow detail very much. If you look at the underside of the ledges and door frame, you will see that it's quite noisy.
A wider shot of the same. You'd be hard pressed to tell this came from a phone camera.
This turned out really well. I've tweaked the blacks slightly again, but unless you view this at 100% on your monitor, it looks like it could have been taken with anything.
Here you can see it struggling with highlights. In fairness though, it was quite harsh lighting with the low winter sun, and any camera would have difficulty, but the dynamic range is fairly limited.
Again, another great example of what it's capable of. Rich detail and punchy colours, but it's still a bit noisy. You can see the noise in areas of solid colour, especially the sky. I know that might sound like I'm being really picky, but I'm not judging it on that, I'm just pointing out that it's there. As I said in the original review, the fact that we are even comparing it to a fully fledged camera speaks volumes.
Im just putting this one in because I love this door!
And finally, a shot of the Christmas Tree on Dublin's O'Connell Street. This shows off the cameras ability to capture detail with the intricate branch structure. As you can see it's sharp all the way across frame, an no let up in the detail. Little or no Chromatic Aberration either. If only all lenses were that artefact free.
Don't forget to check out my Flickr album with even samples on it, and I'll keep it updated with more as I take them!
