Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

iPhone 4, Camera

Bottom Line: Great color, great saturation, great dynamic range, a decent flash. An awesome mobile phone camera in many ways, but a few first edition flaws.

I’ve had my iPhone 4 for two weeks now. It’s an amazing device and I absolutely love it. It’s nearly as much an improvement over my old iPhone 2G as the 2G was an improvement over my old Motorola RAZR. It’s faster. The new retina display is gorgeous. iOS 4 is a terrific operating system; it runs great on the iPhone 4 and isn’t plagued by the performance issues and slowdowns that many users are experiencing with older iPhones. The battery life is improved over previous iPhones. Even taking into consideration that this is a brand new unit, I often go two days without charging.

The iPhone 4 also has a much-touted, much improved camera. It’s like going from your first, old 2MP digital camera years ago and upgrading to a new PowerShot. The new features and specs take what was once a class of digital lo-fi cameras (the iPhone) and gotten very close to a respectable point-and-shoot camera. You won’t be ditching your DSLR for an iPhone 4 any time soon, but you may be leaving the house a lot more without your PowerShot.

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Not everyone is having this problem with their new iPhones, but if you’re experiencing the yellow cast issue some iPhone 4 owners are having with their camera in certain low-light situations (I am one of those experiencing this problem on my iPhone), a quick and easy fix may already be in your toolbox….

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If you’ve upgraded from a previous iPhone to the iPhone 4, in addition to the many new features and updates of the new camera, you may have noticed a slightly larger field of view (FOV) with the iPhone 4. This means the iPhone 4 is capable of wide angle shots that are just a little bit, well… wider.

We compare the old and the new FOV on the iPhone camera after the jump. >>>

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While the iPhone 3G can run the new iOS 4, it’s older, slower CPU is unable to take advantage of all of the new features. Some iPhone users are opting to stay with iPhone OS 3.1.3 until they upgrade to a new iPhone. If you have an original iPhone 2G, you have no choice. The new iOS 4 won’t even run on your hardware.

If you choose not to upgrade, soon you’ll be experiencing app updates that are OS 4.0 only. What do you do? Should you upgrade when iTunes or App Store show updates or should you just ignore the updates?

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July 1, 2010 — Still kind of slow with the photo app updates. There were only a few photo app updates today, although I am excited about the Lux Deluxe update that came out today (the iPhone version of the game of Risk).

The big updates of the day come from Takayuki Fukatsu, the developer of TiltShift Generator. Several of his other apps got updates for iPhone 4 today, OldCamera, SepiaCamera and the popular ToyCamera. All three have been updated for iPhone 4, including full 5MP output capability.

Updates for the Classic Camera series from misskiwi have been submitted to the App Store, but still haven’t been released yet. And we’re still waiting on the new Hipstamatic 160 update with the great new features and bug fixes. Full resolution prints on the iPhone 4 and the flash/flash feature sounds really cool! It’s still in review and hasn’t streeted yet. Really. I just checked.

Go to Life In LoFi’s iPhone 4 Photo App Compatibility Page to see our entire list of photo apps and how well they work on the iPhone 4.

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Some random thoughts and a short review. Not enough for full blog posts, but each warrants some level of discussion. A Thursday edition of Musings….

• I love my new iPhone 4. Its greatness transcends the cellphone suck that is AT&T in my neighborhood (making calls downstairs is an exercise in dropped calls — more bars in more places, except my house). I’ve had it almost one week and I’ve made phone calls, run apps, edited images, tested a lot of apps, checked in on Foursquare, downloaded data. All throughout, the new phone has shined. The only thing I really haven’t done yet is to go on a shoot with my new camera. I’ve taken snapshots… and they’re gorgeous. I want to see what this phone has behind the lens. I really want to take Four out for a shoot.
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  ColorShadow screenshot

  ColorShadow [App Store link] by Hokuson is a pretty cool app. Colorshadow is an app that does variations of one effect, but does it very well. Basically, it converts your image to a stark monochrome and then layers a color gradient over the parts of the image that aren’t white. Because of the stark contrast, it works best when your source image has a simple background that contrasts from the subject. The effects are retro in an early ’70′s Ironside or a ’90′s original iPod commercial kind of way. It’s not a camera — doesn’t even give you the option. It loads images from your camera roll and saves them out at up to your iPhone’s full resolution (including 5MP on the iPhone 4) or a smaller webready size — nice! It’s really easy to use. The effect is very retro and kinda funky. ColorShadow is a good app. I like it. It’s $1.99 in the App Store.
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• If you upgraded your iPhone this time, what do you plan to do with your old iPhone? I’m keeping mine as a spare camera…. I’m keeping my old 2G for those times when I want to shoot digital lofi, not app lofi into my images. The new iPhone 4 camera is really nice. It has excellent clarity, fantastic color and saturation, and a lot less noise than the older cameras. It improves on all the image qualities that made the older iPhones unique — the noise, the color, the overall tint and saturation. The new iPhone 4 is almost a real camera. Its pictures are bright and crisp without needing to run them through a DRC app first. The old iPhone 2G and 3G are true digital “toy” cameras. As mobile phone cameras improve, I suspect that the old iPhones’ value as digital toy cameras — both monetarily and from a iPhoneography standpoint — will only increase and become sought after.
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June 30, 2010 — Just two big photo app updates today. The TiltShift Generator update has some nice iPhone 4 compatibility. Picture Show got a ton of new filters, an enhanced GUI, some iOS 4 bug fixes, but it’s still 2MP output.

Yesterday, CameraKit was updated to version 1.9 and now takes advantage of full iPhone 4 resolutions.

Updates for the Classic Camera series from misskiwi have been submitted to the App Store, but haven’t been released yet. And the Hipstamatic 160 update that adds new features and fixes the issue with the monochrome films was submitted on Monday, but we didn’t see that one today either.

We’ve added several other apps to the list as well, including the new app colorShadow.

Go to Life In LoFi’s iPhone 4 Photo App Compatibility Page to see our entire list of photo apps and how well they work on the iPhone 4.

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Updated: 01.07.11

The new iPhone 4 brings a better, 5MP camera to iPhoneography. How do your favorite iPhone photo apps work with the new hardware and the new iOS 4? I found that many of them work surprisingly well on the iPhone 4.

Some apps have already been updated to take advantage of the auto-focus camera introduced with the iPhone 3GS and many apps have recently been updated for iOS 4 compatibility.

Life In LoFi has created this searchable chart which lists how many of the popular photo apps (and even a few obscure ones) work with the new iPhone 4 and the new OS. The table also lists the maximum output resolutions and if there are any other known issues with the app. This isn’t necessarily an indication of how the apps will perform in iOS 4 on an older device, but how they perform on the iPhone 4.

See how your favorites fared below, after the jump.

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The iPhone 4 Black Screen bug, shown in Camera+

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I love my new iPhone 4. The device itself is fast and solid. Upgrading from my old 2G was amazingly easy and nearly all of my apps play nice with the new phone. However, I’ve been experiencing an issue when using some non-Apple camera apps on the iPhone 4. The screen locks up on the black closed shutter if the app uses the built-in flash. See the above image for the “Shutter Bug”.

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Comparison of iPhone image sizes

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I’m really loving the new iPhone 4. I love the new OS and the phone itself is such an exponential upgrade, especially from one of the older 2G or 3G models.

Even the new Camera app has become my default camera for now. I’m having to learn the capabilities, limits and characteristics of a whole new camera.

My upgrade is from a 2MP iPhone camera to a 5MP. We’re constantly exposed to the numbers of image resolution. I thought it would be interesting to see how the image sizes looked visually so I created the graphic above with the three image sizes from all of the iPhone cameras. As you can see, 2 1/2 times bigger mathematically looks different visually. By the way, even the iPhone’s 2MP images can enlarge for prints quite nicely.

One thing that doesn’t look different visually is the tiny 800×600 resolution that many apps still max out at. Hopefully, new camera APIs will allow these apps to be updated easily. If not, hopefully these apps will just fade away. Even when the cameras were 2 MP, 800×600 resolution was just barely acceptable. Now, unless you’re trying to create a true digital lo-fi look, there is almost no reason any more to be constrained to this ever-decreasing canvas.

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