Does the iPhone’s camera suck?

Last week I posted some photos on MyMac.com which had been taken with my iPhone. While my accompanying article had nothing to do with the iPhone, the photos served to demonstrate precisely what the iPhone’s built-in camera is not capable of doing well. Want to use your iPhone to take a picture of someone standing across the street? Cross your fingers. Want to take a picture after dark with no external lighting? Don’t bother. How about someone moving past you at walking speed? Not until you’ve had some practice at it.

However, none of that implies that the iPhone’s camera is useless or even lousy. In fact, for someone like me who never carries a camera outside of situations where I know I’ll want to take pictures, having a halfway-decent camera built into my omnipresent iPhone means I’m in a better situation photography-wise than I’ve ever been previously. But enough about my situation, you probably want to know to what extent (if any) the iPhone’s camera might end up being to you. And that task if probably best accomplished by photographic evidence.

First, a disclaimer: the more I try to hold something still, the more my hands generally insist on shaking, and this applies most of all to holding a camera steady. For this reason I always ask other staff members to handle principal photography at conferences. And while I take my own product shots in my accessory reviews, what you see is rarely my first attempt. So, keeping in mind that most of the pictures below were taken by me, they’re probably a little worse than what the average iPhone user would have ended up with in the same situation.

Alright, let’s see what kind of (warning: pun) picture I can paint for you here…

This picture was taken outdoors in the middle of the night in very poor lighting. As you can tell, the iPhone (unlike the cameras built into Apple’s laptops) can’t provide a flash, so in the near-total absence of backlighting you end up with a photo like this, and that’s after you clean it up a bit in iPhoto:

However, a few days later, in the early evening with a decent amount of sunlight, I used my iPhone to take a photo of the same exact thing (although by this time they had sunk it into the sidewalk) and it came out dramatically different:

Indoors with partial lighting, you’ll get mixed results with the iPhone’s camera depending on said lighting. Although I was standing in the pitched black when I took this photo at the Chris Cornell concert the other night, and I was about forty feet from the stage, it came out fairly decent:

On the other hand, when the stage lights were in a different position, Chris Cornell’s white T-shirt was almost completely washed out (as was most of the rest of him):

One key drawback with the iPhone’s camera is that its shutter speed isn’t as fast as one might expect. One of the reasons why I had to settle for across-the-street pictures of the Harry Potter premiere is that when some of the stars did walk within a few feet of me, I tried to take a close-up picture of them only to find that they weren’t anywhere in the picture! A bit of subsequent experimenting led me to realize that the iPhone doesn’t really finish taking a picture until its on-screen virtual shutter re-opens. If you want a picture of someone who’s in motion, you’ll need to take a picture of the spot they’ll be located when the iPhone’s shutter re-opens, not where they’re standing when you first press the button to take the picture.

And again, bright white can wash things out something fierce in the wrong lighting. You might have to stare at this photo for awhile before you figure out that that there are actually two people wearing white while walking next to each other; you might initially only see one person person wearing white, or think that both of them are sharing the same oversized white wardrobe. And good luck figuring out that the shorter of the two is in fact Harry Potter star Emma Watson. For what it’s worth, the photo was taken from about twenty feet away and I was standing in terrible lighting at the time:

All of that having been said, if you’re simply looking to take a picture of a stationary object in good lighting, either of something that’s not too small or not too far away, the iPhone can crank out some rather nice-looking photos. For instance, I’m plenty happy with this slightly cropped but otherwise unedited photo of Grauman’s Chinese from across the street:

The bottom line is that if you’re on vacation or otherwise think you’ll want to end up with high-quality pictures, having your iPhone with you probably won’t save you from carrying a separate camera. For instance, I know for sure that I’ll be taking my digital camera with me to Chicago next month (more on that later). But if you’ve always been of the opinion (like me) that camera-phones were someone’s idea of a sick joke, then the functionality of the iPhone’s camera just might come as a pleasant surprise.

As a final method of making my point, I’ll share a photo taken not with my iPhone but with my previous cell phone, a fairly expensive Motorola SLVR with a truly horrible built-in camera. Roughly the same lighting as the very first photo in this article, taken by someone with steadier hands than mine, and from a much closer distance to boot…and this was after a substantial amount of adjustment work in iPhoto.

If you’re wondering, that’s a picture of me with Colbie Caillat, whose debut album was coincidentally released today and is currently featured on the front page of the iTunes Store…but I digress.

Now that I’ve got my iPhone, I have solace in knowing that as long as I’m carrying it with me, I’ll never come home with a photo as bad as the one above. Your mileage is likely to vary for a variety of reasons. Let’s hope that Apple includes a higher-quality camera in the next iPhone generation (zoom and flash would likely help more than megapixels), but in the mean time don’t be afraid to rely on your iPhone’s built-in camera if you find you’ve left your real camera at home and you encounter a photo opportunity that you really want to home with.