W
hile the iPhone 5c uses the same iSight camera as the older iPhone 5, the iPhone 5s benefits from an improved image signal processor in the A7 chipset, and boasts a clever two-part LED flash, known as a ‘True Tone’ flash, a largerf/2.2 aperture, and better low-light sensitivity thanks to larger sensor pixels.
Using all three handsets we ran a series of tests in various conditions to find out how these improvements can impact photo quality. For example, we took low-light shots to find out what effect has the jump
from f/2.4- to f/2.2 aperture, and zoomed in on some of our photos to witness the level of detail that can be achieved by the iPhone 5s’ larger pixels.
Note that photo quality may be affected by paper stock and print quality. See the originals at tinyurl.com/q9c2xb8.
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Low light without flash: people
With its wider aperture and larger pixels, the iPhone 5s should perform better than the iPhone 5 and 5c in low-light photography without a flash. Given that the iPhone 5 and 5c supposedly use the same camera, however, what really surprised us was the improved quality of the 5c over the iPhone 5.
The 5s captured clear, crisp shots with plenty of detail, accurate colour reproduction and little noise. The ‘Sprinkler valve' wording on
the sign on the door reveals a world of difference between the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c. We felt that the reds were a little too red in the iPhone 5c example.
Low light without flash: objects
In our below example of the tap the iPhone 5s is the clear winner.
The iPhone 5c and iPhone 5 were equally affected by noise.
Colour reproduction
Colour reproduction is an important factor in assessing a camera’s quality. Even in this age of Instagram, no-one really wants their images too heavily saturated. The difference in colour reproduction is evident in our test shots from the iPhone 5, 5c and 5s, with the latter able to produce far more accurate colour than the cheaper
iPhone 5c and older iPhone 5. This is particularly noticeable in the reds, as seen in our example below.
At a glance there doesn’t appear to be a lot of difference between the three photographs below. Despite the low-light conditions, however, the iPhone 5s offered a brighter image.
Low light with flash
The iPhone 5s’ True Tone flash mixes two LED light sources of different temperatures to shed more natural light on your subject.
This should avoid the washed-out glare of most smartphone flash units. We took some photos in the dimly lit St Pancras Renaissance
Hotel. PC Advisor editor Jim Martin has a nasty case of red-eye with both the iPhone 5 and 5c, but more so the former. There’s little difference in skin tones, but the iPhone 5s image is clearer, and the flash has lit his face rather than the surroundings.
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Features
iPHONE PHOTO SHOOTOUTHDR photos
Apple’s Camera app has offered an HDR mode since iOS 4.1.
A high-dynamic-range image combines a series of under-, over- and properly exposed photographs. The best parts of each is selected to produce a composite image that is high in detail both in the shadows and the highlights.
One area of photography in which we find HDR mode useful is when capturing shots of windows, as seen in our examples below.
The iPhone 5 and 5c offer similar-quality HDR photography, although we found the 5c offered clearer detail when we zoomed in on our test shots.
Larger pixels
Whereas much of Apple’s smartphone competition has been cramming in the megapixels, Apple believes that it’s the quality of the camera sensor that is important. In other words, it’s not about the number of megapixels; it’s how big they are.
In the iPhone 5s the pixel width has increased from 1.4- to 1.5 µm.
That’s just 100-nanometre per pixel, but larger pixels yield greater electrical output, leading to clearer images in low-light conditions without resorting to messy noise-reduction techniques.
As you can see from our examples, in most cases we found the best clarity in photographs taken by the iPhone 5s. However, we also found the iPhone 5c performed better than the iPhone 5, with images from the latter appearing relatively blurred and washed out.
A good way to judge the effect of the iPhone 5s’ larger pixels is to utilise the zoom. When we zoomed in on the windows of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel we found the iPhone 5’s photo shows far more noise than that of the iPhone 5s.
Light and dark
We also took some snaps without HDR to see how the cameras dealt with areas of light and dark within a photo.
Examined close-up some subtle differences could be detected.
For example, with the iPhone 5s image colours were brighter and crisper around the windows of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, while the iPhone 5c was veered toward the red, and the iPhone 5’s
efforts were blurry and washed-out. The text on the Euston Road sign was also clearer in the iPhone 5s image.
The iPhone 5s performed the best in the dark windows of the British Library; the iPhone 5’s photo was especially pixelated.
There was a marked difference between blue sky and white clouds with the 5s, but less of a distinction with the 5 and 5c.
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Macro photographs
These close-up shots were taken without zoom, enabling us to assess how well the iPhone could focus. We found all three phones struggled to find and maintain a focus point. Interestingly, the iPhone 5c managed to focus more closely on the flower’s anthers than did the iPhone 5 and 5s. We expected the iPhone 5s to win this test.
As we have noted in our assessment of several of our other test shots, however, the iPhone 5s overdid it somewhat with the reds.
The iPhone 5s gave the most faithful reproduction in terms of colour and the level of detail shown in the flower’s petals. Once again, the iPhone 5’s attempt appeared less crisp.
Panorama
Our final comparison is of the Panorama (or Pano) modes. We were interested in how each handset coped in stitching together scenery.
One of the iPhone 5s’ new features is the ability to adjust the lighting as you pan, which was perfectly demonstrated in the panoramic shot we took of the staircase. We expected the efforts of the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c to be reasonably similar, so we were
surprised by how blown out were the windows in the iPhone 5c’s image. We will endeavour to investigate this further.
Our final photo is a panorama of a landscape. All the phones did a good job of stitching together the images, but we did notice that the sky on the lefthand side was more blown out in the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5 images.
Motion photography
They say never to work with children or animals... probably because they don’t stay still for long. The iPhone 5s’ burst mode is a solution to this problem, able to reduce motion blur by taking four shots and blending together the best bits of each. The iPhone 5 and 5c also feature a burst mode, although they won’t automatically stitch together the resulting series of photographs.
Burst mode on the iPhone 5s can also take a series of photos and display the best of the bunch. You can change its selection, but we felt it did a pretty good job.
For each phone we picked the best image from a series of shots of a cat. All the photos were pretty good, although the cat’s whiskers and fur were more clearly defined in the iPhone 5s photograph.
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I
f you use iTunes regularly, you’ve probably experienced a litany of frustrations with the software – and accumulated a list of ‘I wish it did this’ items. Here are five tools that will help you bend iTunes to your will.1.
Change the cursor sizeWhen it consisted of music albums encoded as 128kbps MP3 files, your iTunes library was probably a manageable size. But add in TV programmes, movies, home videos and Apple Lossless CD rips, and even the mightiest of hard drives can start to get cramped.
So what’s the solution? You could buy a big external drive and move your entire iTunes folder to this, to handle current and future content. But that can be a complicated process, and you might not want to opt for the all-or-nothing approach. For us, TuneSpan (£10.49, tinyurl.com/l2fgaj5) from Random Applications is the way to go. With it, you can relocate (span) content to
multiple hard drives to free up space on your main drive, while continuing to see, play and sync everything in iTunes as you normally would.
2.
HandBrakeFor legal issues, iTunes can’t rip your purchased DVDs to copy to your iOS devices or play on your Apple TV.But many third-party programs can, and HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr) is at the top of our list of apps for such purposes.
You can use it to pull movies and TV shows off the DVDs you’ve bought over the years and convert them to a format suitable for your Apple devices, at the same time including subtitles/closed-captioning data or removing unwanted audio tracks, for example, in the process.
3.
iFlicksOnce you’ve ripped your DVDs, you’re left with files, and absolutely no tagging metadata to help iTunes sort and display them properly.To fix that problem, you’ll need a tagging utility. (These are also very useful if you record TV shows from free, over-the-air signals using an EyeTV-type device.) Our favourite tagging utility is iFlicks (£13.99, tinyurl.com/q647kk5).
This app looks up metadata from online TV show and movie databases, and can add tags such as episode names, movie release dates, descriptions, and cover art to your files.
iFlicks is also a video transcoding app that can convert files from one format to another to make smaller versions of big