Yesterday I oh-so-casually mentioned in passing that – as with previous “S” models” – one of the biggest upgrades would be to the camera and imaging system. So big, in fact, that the new camera would really need it’s own posting to do it justice.
Oh, look, a camera post. What were the chances?
So – in no particular order, here’s what the newest generation iPhones will have for the camera geeks in the crowd:
A bigger imaging element. Yay. What this should mean is an increase in low-light sensitivity. One of the longstanding flaws in the iPhone cameras, almost since the word go, is poor (ie: completely terrible) low-light performance. If Apple was smart they would use this new real estate on the imaging element to correct this. However, it looks like the marketing droids got their way and instead it will be wasted on More Megapixels. Sad, really … for anyone with a brain “9 megapixels and awesome low-light performance” is much more enticing than “12 megapixels”. Marketing and brains are concepts that rarely intersect.
4K video. Okay, maybe that new imaging slab isn’t being completely wasted. Combined with the newest A9 processor, it will put legit 4K video – none of this upsampled tomfoolery – in your pocket. That’s pretty swank.
Siri learns that she has a camera. Yep. Siri gets eyes to go with her ears. Will it be as prosaic as “hey, take a picture” or will it be as awesome as “watch this area and tell me when the dog pees on the couch”? I’m guessing the former. I want the latter.
Faster burst mode. That new processing power means that bursts can be even more bursty.
Slower slo-mo. That new processing power means that slow-mo can be even more, er, slowy.
Awesome new editing and production tools. Did I mention that there is a host of new processing power here? I did? Good. You do the math on this one.
Force touch camera integration. Force touch comes to the iOS family this year. Force touch has all sorts of awesome possibilities for camera control … everything from force-press to shortcut to the camera app to force-press to control focus/exposure/what-have-you. Expect to see all of it here.
Printing comes back. Okay, it’s not part of the camera per se, but you can expect to see Apple get back into some sort of photo printing integration. Specifically, the “printing big-ass enlargements on canvas and the like to hang on your wall” … if nothing else, all those Shiny New Megapixels will give some pretty stunning large-format printing options.
There you go. Justice, done. Bring on the megapixels.
