The iPhone 5S is looking fantastic for photographers. It has a new, bigger sensor, a color-mixing flash and some crazy image-processing software to make your pictures even better, right before you feed them into Instagram and undo all the good work.
Oh,and the camera just Sherlocked GoPro, with a 120fps slo-mo mode.
There’s a new five-element ƒ2.2 lens, a 15% bigger sensor but the same amount of (now bigger) pixels as before. And the flash has been split into two parts, with one cold LED and one warm-colored LED. The two can be independently controlled and the colors mixed to match the room light of any scene. That’s right – no more cold bluish subjects and warm, candlelit backgrounds.
But the biggest stuff is in the software. First, the new 5S can create what Apple is calling a “dynamic tone map,” which looks like fancy talk for HDR. There’s also multi-zone matrix light metering, the kind of thing found in SLRs.
And when you take a picture, the iPhone takes a burst and pick the best one, using it’s new image stabilizer and clever software to pick the best and sharpest image.
Not bad, huh? Wait, there’s more. The same fast camera can shoot 120fps slo-mo video, which means that a whole lot of people won’t need a GoPro.
I’m going to take a closer look into this – the camera looks like it might share a lot of DNA with the camera in the new iPhone 5C. Either way, my resolution not to buy a new iPhone this year just evaporated.
