One of the worst parts of the iPhones 2G and 3G was the camera. It wasn’t just that it was a low-res two-megapixel piece of junk. More, it was that it seemed tacked on in decidedly un-Apple way, a vestigial afterthought that, although integrated throughout the iPhone software, never felt as polished as it could. It was almost as if Apple put it there in a hissy fit of exasperation, just because you have to have a camera in a phone these days. You can imagine Jobs finally giving the go-ahead: “Fine, if they want a damn camera in a phone, put one in there. But screw ‘em. Make it suck.”
Now, though, the 3GS is here, with three shiny megapixels. That, though, is not the important part. The camera will also auto focus instead of just using a fixed lens, and the software has been upgraded too. To choose where you want the camera to focus, just touch that part of the picture. The camera will also use this information to weight color balance and exposure.
The unstoppable Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times tech writer and Apple-nerd, has been testing it out, and has posted a set of pictures over at Flickr. Here’s what he says:
[The] fact that you can do “spot metering” puts it among the neatest cameraphones available. Touch the part of the live image that should be properly-exposed and the Camera app will make all of its focus, exposure and white-balance decisions based on that sampling. Bonus: by sampling from the bright, dark and middle areas of the image and taking three separate images, you can even do HDR imaging!
Browsing through the pictures shows that this salvo of updates has been a winner. The photos now look like they come from a camera, not from a phone. And did we mention that it also does video?
iPhone 3G S [Flickr Set]
Photo: AndyI/Flickr
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