Apple boasts that the camera on the new iPhone 5 is their best yet. Smaller, faster, four times more sensitive in dim light, a new panorama mode, all shielded under a scratch-resistant cover. Is this the phone that will kill the compact camera? Read on for a hands-on review of the iPhone 5 camera for photographers.

If you’re used to shooting with a dedicated camera, an iPhone might not seem to pose much of a threat to traditional cameras. Sure, it’s always with you, but it’s got a tiny sensor, a tiny lens that’s always exposed to scratches, no optical zoom, no real flash, and little by way of manual controls. Everyone knows that the iPhones 4 and 4s are the two most-used cameras on Flickr, but they’re not for serious photos, right?

Yet sales of compact cameras are plummeting, particularly those with smaller zooms, and many people are pointing the finger at smartphones as the cause.

This article take a detailed look at the iPhone 5 camera from two angles: firstly compared to its predecessor, the iPhone 4s, to see what’s improved in the world's most popular camera. But I’ll also look at how it performs as a regular, dedicated camera. That’s almost certainly not being fair – the iPhone 5 is not trying to be just a camera. But at AU$1,000 for an outright purchase of the top model, plus the cost of using it as a phone, it'll hit your pocket just as hard as an expensive camera. So how good is it?

With this update to the iPhone 5, Apple stuck with the same eight megapixels, the same angle of view for its five-element lens, the same fixed f/2.4 aperture and the same 4:3 aspect ratio. So on the surface it sounds similar to the iPhone 4s. In the launch keynote, Apple said they had made the job harder for the camera design team by making the camera volume 25% smaller. The sensor and the lens on the iPhone 5 are both smaller than on the iPhone 4s, and photographers know that bigger - not smaller - normally means better. But Apple also promised that the iPhone 5 gives better image quality than the iPhone 4s. Pictures in low-light are said to be improved with a “Dynamic low-light mode” that combines pixels together to give up to four times the sensitivity, and a “smart filter” that chooses which areas of a picture need noise reduction (or de-speckling), and which areas don’t. They also promised better-aligned lens elements for a clearer picture, and 40% faster photo capture. All but one of these promised improvements lie with better image signal processing, not with the camera hardware. So have the digital improvements been able to improve the pictures, despite shrinking the camera?

Brisbane's South Bank. iPhone 5, 1/120s, f/2.4, ISO 200. Unretouched panorama straight from the phone.

In the hand

The iPhone 5 keeps essentially the same layout as the iPhone 4s, and everything falls to hand in the same way. The camera app makes use of the extra screen height to give a bigger view, but this crops the left and right edges from the view, so when held vertically, your pictures actually record more at the sides than you saw in the app.

Tap-to-focus-and-set-brightness works as before, but you notice a change as soon as you take your first picture: the speed.

Speed demon

The iPhone 5 camera feels much more responsive than the iPhone 4s camera. It opens faster, saves faster and you can shoot photos in quicker succession than with the iPhone 4s. You can literally hammer at the button to shoot lots of pictures, and it almost keeps up with you. It certainly makes the 4s feel pedestrian by comparison. Just as with dedicated cameras, the main delay now with the iPhone 5 is waiting for it to acquire focus, and it seems to focus at the same pace as the 4s. That pace is very slow compared to a DSLR, but not bad for a compact camera. Once focus is locked, just like the 4s, it shoots the instant that you take your finger off the button. Or you can also shoot by pressing either of the volume buttons on the phone or on the headphones as a remote-control.

Picture quality

The iPhone 5 gives a different look to pictures compared to the iPhone 4s, and you can see the difference in these HDR shots.

iPhone 4s, HDR mode on. 1/590s, f/2.4, ISO 64. Unretouched image straight from phone

iPhone 5, HDR mode on. 1/640s, f/2.4, ISO 50. Unretouched image straight from phone

The iPhone 5 has filtered the picture more heavily to remove 'noise' or speckling - this will be the work of the improved Image Signal Processor (ISP) that Apple touted at the launch. Apple said it intelligently recognises areas (such as blue sky) that can safely be softened, from detailed areas that can't. But all of these filters inevitably smooth over a little bit of detail, so there is a trade-off. I find it's a personal choice how much smoothing different people like. Some like the clean, soft look, while others prefer grit and strong edges.

For my taste, the smoothing on the iPhone 5 is a little too heavy-handed, but its photos do respond well to boosting contrast and 'sharpening' tools in apps such as Snapseed, or in desktop software that can add more 'bite' to the picture. Much of the crispness difference between the two shots above can be restored that way, so the iPhone 5 shots are well-suited to editing. But I miss the initial punch of the iPhone 4s shots.

How do iPhone 5 photos stack up against dedicated cameras and the iPhone 4s?

This series of photos compares the same scene shot on different cameras.

All of the cameras were set to base ISO where possible, and hand-held with a shutter speed that would be unlikely to cause blur (the slowest was 1/60th second on the NIkon D3), and focus was set on the trees towards the right of the frame that were around 80m away. The light was overcast, and slight rain took away some of the contrast in the pictures. I took several shots at different exposures and chose the images that where closest matched for brightness. Afterwards, I checked the files for camera-shake on the computer - not seeing any isn't a guarantee that they're 100% as sharp as they can be, however. All of the photos except for two pairs are untouched jpegs straight from the camera. To get the most out of the Nikon and Panasonic cameras, I also shot raw format as well as jpegs, and treated these raw files to a full round of sharpening in Adobe Lightroom 4 to my taste. The pictures below show 100% crops from the centre of the main picture, and also from the extreme right hand side because some lenses gives softer pictures at the edges.

The cameras have different numbers of megapixels, and these screen views are enlarged to make the pixels the same size, to show all the detail that each camera can capture. The smallest are the iPhone shots - they represent an enlargement 115cm wide, while the largest are those from the Canon, which represent a picture just over 150cm wide.

Brisbane city, taken with an iPhone 5

Centre iPhone 4s

1/230s, f/2.4, ISO 64 Edge iPhone 4s

1/230s, f/2.4, ISO 64

iPhone 5

1/230s, f/2.4, ISO 50 iPhone 5

1/230s, f/2.4, ISO 50

Panasonic LX5 compact ($500 in 2010)

1/100s, f/4.0, ISO 80, jpeg Panasonic LX5 compact ($500 in 2010)

1/100s, f/4.0, ISO 80, jpeg

Panasonic LX5 compact

1/100s, f/4.0, ISO 80, raw, sharpened Panasonic LX5 compact

1/100s, f/4.0, ISO 80, raw, sharpened

Canon A2200 compact ($100 in 2011)

1/125s, f/3.2, ISO 80 Canon A2200 compact ($100 in 2011)

1/125s, f/3.2, ISO 80

Nikon D3, 17-35 f/2.8 ($9,000 total in 2008)

1/60s, f/9, ISO 200, jpeg Nikon D3, 17-35 f/2.8 ($9,000 total in 2008)

1/60s, f/9, ISO 200, jpeg

Nikon D3, 17-35 f/2.8

1/60s, f/9, ISO 200, raw, sharpened Nikon D3, 17-35 f/2.8

1/60s, f/9, ISO 200, raw, sharpened

I can make out very few differences between the pictures from the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5 on this image. The edge image shows fractionally less noise in the sky on the iPhone 5, and fractionally more smearing in the rightmost tree in the same image. Apart from that, they could be the same. On these particular iPhones, I don't see any evidence of clearer pictures from better alignment of lens elements. On both of the iPhones, the edge of the picture is as sharp as the centre with no hint of chromatic aberration, while the Canon and Panasonic are both noticeably less sharp at their edge than at their centre.

The cheap Canon A2200 gives remarkable clarity at the centre of the picture. Its slightly artificial look comes from aggressive sharpening that the camera applies to photos. But both contrast and sharpness fall off dramatically at the edge, and chromatic aberrations creep in.

Overall, the Panasonic LX5 has a slight lead over the iPhones when shot in jpeg, and that lead stretches further with raw files. The Nikon D3 gives a more natural look than all of the cameras when shot in raw, but its jpegs are soft by comparison. I would rank the $100 Canon as narrowly at the bottom, then the iPhones with virtually nothing to separate them, then the Panasonic and the Nikon (when shot and processed in raw) narrowly at the top.

To put these differences into perspective, before the release of the iPhone 5, we asked 50 non-photographers to compare 15" prints of a similar image from each of these cameras, to work out which were the cheap ones and which the expensive ones and which was the iPhone 4s. 15" prints aren't a stringent photographic test, but they're bigger than most iPhone photos will ever be printed. Over half of people placed the iPhone 4s above the Nikon D3. The picture quality from the iPhones is 'good enough' for most people.

All of these pictures were taken without using the zoom on the iPhones, as their picture quality plummets if you use the digital zoom, so you have to be comfortable with the fixed 33mm-equivalent focal length of the lens.

Low-light shooting

One of the big draw-cards for the iPhone 5 camera is that it can shoot in just one quarter of the light needed by the iPhone 4s, and it works both in photos and on the display:

It's too dark for the iPhone 4s (left) to display much,

while the iPhone 5 (right) can still display and shoot the whole scene.

Photo by Laura, with thanks.

Apple calls this two-stop boost to sensitivity the "Dynamic low light mode", and iPhone 5 pictures taken in dim light can have ISO settings as high as 3200 (the iPhone 4s has a top of just 800). In typical Apple fashion, it enters this mode automatically, with no indication that anything is happening, except that the image on the display brightens considerably, and the image metadata report the higher ISO settings. This 2-stop boost to sensitivity comes with a cost: a lot of the fine detail is lost.

The iPhone 5 can capture images in a quarter of the light compared to the iPhone 4s, but the 100% view on the right shows that the crispness of the image is degraded considerably. iPhone 5, 1/15s, ISO 3200

Is the "Dynamic low light mode" better than simply boosting the brightness of photos afterwards on the computer? The following pictures show the same scene shot on the iPhone 5 (upper images) and iPhone 4s (lower images) in light too dark for the 4s to get a properly-exposed photos. The iPhone 4s was subsequently made brighter in Adobe Lightroom.

iPhone 5, 1/15s, ISO 3200. Unedited original (left) and 100% view (right)

iPhone 4s, 1/15s, ISO 800. The original image was too dark, and it was brightened in Adobe Lightroom by adding +2.0 to the 'Exposure' slider (approximating 2 stops more light). Brightened image (left) and 100% view (right)

The colours are more natural in the iPhone 5 photo, as it did a better job of recognising and removing the red colour-cast that came from the incandescent lights. It's also a more convenient photo to take: you can see what you're going to get when you shoot, while the iPhone 4s image was just dark on screen when shooting. But the brightened iPhone 4s image shows finer grain, and more detail in the shadows. Neither image shows great detail, but both could look acceptable for small prints.

Personally, I prefer the detail of the computer-brightened image from the iPhone 4s over the shot from the iPhone 5.

The iPhone view

The iPhone lends itself to a different style of photography compared to a DSLR.

The lens on the iPhone 5 is a fixed 4.13mm f/2.4, which gives the equivalent view and depth of field of a 33mm lens at about f/19 on a full-frame camera. The iPhone camera can't change its aperture, so nearly everything is in focus in all your shots. That’s bad news if you want to shoot blurry-background portraits – the iPhone simply can’t take them without help from apps that paint in the blur afterwards. But if you want everything in focus, it’s a pleasant surprise. You get the huge depth of field of f/19, but with an extra 6 stops more light that come from a real aperture of f/2.4. Compared to an SLR, you can shoot landscapes that are 60 times darker without a tripod, all at the lowest ISO for the best quality. At my latitude in Brisbane, Australia (27 degrees) that translates to about an extra 40 minutes of shooting at dusk before the phone starts to lose picture quality by turning up its ISO. Those 40 minutes are enough to reach the dim, interesting light that forces DSLRs onto a tripod if you want a lot of depth of field. If you live closer to the poles, you'll get even longer.

Just for fun, I wondered how the iPhone 5 would compare against a full-frame DSLR when you want everything in focus and hand-held. By creating a test with all the conditions stacked in the favour of the iPhone, how would it compare against a Nikon D3? Here is a comparison of the same scene shot hand-held with the iPhone 5 and a Nikon D3 in the dim EV4 light of the Queensland Museum in Brisbane. The only constraint was that it needed to be hand-held, so I kept the D3 shutter speed to 1/15s and rested on a surface.

iPhone 5, 1/15s, f/2.4, ISO 640. Original image left, and 100% crop right

Nikon D3, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens, 1/15s, f/16, ISO 25,600, jpeg. Original image left and 100% crop right This lighting didn't allow f/19 and 1/15s, and even the compromise f/16 gave under-exposure

The 100% crops are from the sharpest part of the spine. In order to match the iPhone’s hand-holdable shutter speed of 1/15th second while also matching its depth-of-field by using an aperture of f/16 (it couldn’t quite get to f/19 in that light), the Nikon D3 needed to set its highest ISO setting: 25,600, which had a serious impact on the quality of the picture. Yet still it couldn't match the the depth of field from the iPhone, nor achieve the same exposure. Score one to the iPhone 5.

This represents an extremely narrow set of circumstances in a contrived test. The iPhone falls behind in quality the moment you bring a tripod into the equation, or change the lighting, or if you want any of the things an iPhone alone can't do: a different focal length, different aperture, raw files, or flash. But to see that there is any overlap between them in quality in any situation surprised me. For reference, here is the same shot on a tripod with the Nikon D3 in raw, processed and sharpened in Adobe Lightroom 4 and Photoshop. The image quality is in a different league to the other images, but it can only be shot on a tripod. With the right camera app, the iPhone shot will also be improved on a tripod.

Nikon D3, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens, 30s, f/22, ISO 200, raw, sharpened. Original image left and 100% crop right With a tripod, the Nikon D3 can give far superior picture quality and slightly more depth of field.

Controlling the Phone

The iPhone doesn't offer you any control over aperture, shutter speed or ISO, so you might expect that you'd feel like a "passenger", with the phone making all the decisions and you just along for the ride. I get that feeling when shooting a dedicated camera on automatic. But I've never had that feeling when shooting with iPhones. That's because iPhones are entirely predictable, and you quickly get to know what result they'll give you.

The settings on the iPhone camera aren’t controlled directly by the apps, but by the phone instead. And the phone responds to light in the same, predictable way every time: in the same level of light, it always chooses the same settings, regardless of which camera app you’re using. It’s only recently that a handful of apps like Nightcap and 645 Pro have found ways to let the user try to tweak the settings for shooting, and then only in very dim light. But the phone still reserves the right to veto your choice of settings if it suspects they’re not appropriate.

But it doesn’t have a great number of settings to choose from. There’s only one aperture (f/2.4 on the iPhone 5), and no way to change it. That leaves just two things for the camera to juggle as the light changes – shutter speed and ISO, and it plays with them in a predictable, simple way that has barely changed since the iPhone 4. The graph below tells the story:

How the iPhones pick ISO and shutter speed in various levels of light. Note the steady drop in the lowest ISO with each subsequent model

In bright light, it changes just the shutter speed, and in dim light, it changes just the ISO. And the tipping point to swap between the two is the typical indoor brightness. Essentially, if you're outside during the day, the phone only changes the shutter speed. When you're indoors, it only changes the ISO.

Outside by day, the iPhone 5 leaves the ISO untouched at its base of 50 to give the best picture detail. The shutter speed ranges from 1/28,000 second if you point at the sun, down to a possibly-wobbly 1/20 second as you reach the brightness of an interior.

If the light dims below EV7.5, the iPhone changes tack. Now it leaves the shutter speed unchanged at 1/20th second, and instead it gradually boosts the ISO until it hits its limit of 3200 in the dimmest light it can handle without using other apps: candlelight (EV1.5). Apart from a slight tweak of the shutter speed to 1/15th second around EV4.5, it’s a simple story.

So far, the only times that I have seen the iPhone 5 stray from the line in the diagram above are when shooting panoramas, when it always tried to keep the shutter speed at or above 1/100s, and it may boost the ISO to do so, or when its faced with fluorescent lights, and tries to match the shutter speed to the frequency of their flickering.

Flash and red-eye

The "flash" on all the current iPhone models isn't really a flash; it's a bright LED. And while it's very bright for an LED, it's nowhere near as powerful as the strobe flash found on a dedicated camera, so it only reaches a couple of metres from the phone. On the iPhone 4s and earlier, it's placed so close to the lens that photos are plagued by red-eye. On the iPhone 5, the flash has been moved 3mm further away, but that doesn't seem to be far enough, as red-eye is still runs rampant.

The LED flash is not as neutral in colour as a camera flash - the flash on my handset has a slight green tinge. While many cameras set their white balance to match the colour of the flash when it fires, the iPhone doesn't, so photos faithfully record any colour bias from the flash. I see hundreds of iPhones on our courses, and I've found lots of difference in the colour of the flash between handsets from the iPhone 4, ranging from neutral with a green tinge, to noticeably orange. The LED flashes that we've seen on iPhone 4s handsets have been more consistent.

Panorama shooting

The panorama mode instantly creates single-row panoramas as you smoothly rotate the camera through up to 200 degrees. It's easy to use, and the the detail and resolution it gives is impressive.

Brisbane's New Farm Park. Iphone 5, 1/120s, f/2.4, ISO 250. Unretouched panorama

It even guides you with feedback on-screen to keep it smooth and level, prompting “Slow Down”, or “Move up”. The phone boosts the shutter speed to at least 1/120th second to freeze your motion, and in dim light, it also boosts the ISO to avoid wobbles.

It builds-up the panorama in real-time, piecing it together out of thin strips. This gives a number of differences to traditional panoramic apps that stitch together adjacent photos:

iPhone 5 copes well with panoramas that sweep between parts in full sun to parts in shade, getting reasonable contrast and brightness in both areas. But there's no option for making the panorama out of HDR photos to get both the sky and the ground looking good. Like all stitching apps, it occasionally makes mistakes, but the mistakes tend to be minor and localised, and so don't spoil the overall picture. Traditional stiching apps also make mistakes, but they tend to be bigger, such as when they don't 'get' where one of the photos belongs in the panorama, and put it in totally the wrong spot. With so many seams to stitch, fine, repetitive detail can be hard to get right as with the patterns on the stationary escalators in this example. The 1/120 second shutter speed might work well in the USA with 60Hz power, but it's not the best starting point for good panoramas under fluorescent lights in countries with 50Hz power - here's a crop from a plain wall that's come out covered in vertical stripes due to the flickering of the fluorescent lights. If you see these stripes, point the phone directly at the lights for a moment, and it will measure their flickering and set 1/100th second instead, getting rid of the banding. The iPhone automatically trims the panorama to get rid of any wobbly edges, and the final saved panorama can be up to 28 megapixels in size (depending on how much was trimmed off). Note that not all editing apps can handle files this big.

The sapphire crystal cover

To a photographer, the lens on the iPhones seems horribly exposed, with no protection from the elements or the keys and change in your pocket. The iPhone 5 has a new covering made of sapphire crystal, which Apple claims will better resist scratches. Pointing it directly at the sun, I couldn't see any extra lens flare compared to an iPhone 4s. In fact, the flare was well-controlled - just a small central spot, and some purple flaring of lights that are just immediately outside of the field of view.

Storing and managing photos

Like all iPhones to date, the iPhone 5 has no memory card or removable storage, so you’re stuck with the memory limit of the phone – nominally 16, 32 or 64 GB, but there’s less actually available – this new, empty 64GB version reports its capacity as 57.3 GB. With normal photo sizes hovering around 2MB each, and panoramas around 16MB, that’s still an awful lot of photos, but you may want space for music, videos, movies, e-mails and apps too. So if you’re travelling, you might want a computer or cloud storage to offload photos to.

Management of your photos unfortunately appears unchanged on the iPhone 5 with iOS6. Apple seems to want your computer (not your phone) to be the centre of your digital universe, and Apple limits your ways to organise photos directly on the phone. You can create folders called “albums” on the phone, and these will store “aliases” or “shortcuts” to any images that you put there, so you can go ahead and put the same images into as many albums as you like without filling up the phone. But when you plug the phone into a computer to offload the images, you can’t see these albums, and your photos are found scattered through numerous cryptically-named folders on the phone. Apple seems to be gently reminding you that iTunes is meant to be the boss, and handle all the syncing and exchange of photos for you. This may not be practical for photographers, and it is possible to use Lightroom 4 to import iPhone photos onto computers, and simply treat the phone as an over-sized memory card with a camera attached.

There is no star-rating system nor keywording for images in the camera roll, so organisation becomes a challenge once you have lots of images. Some apps offer it, but only by duplicating all of your photos and then rating and keywording the new copies.

Battery Life

Battery life is the bane of iPhone photographers – constantly feeding electricity into a thirsty phone. Apple claims slightly longer battery life, and this was borne out by fully-charging both an iPhone 5 and 4s, and doing the same things with both through the day in airplane mode. The iPhone 5 ended up at 55%, while the 8-month-old iPhone 4s was down to 47%, backing-up Apples claim of a welcome improvement.

Colours and brightness

In natural light, the colours are similar between the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5. Reds appear a little more vivid on my iPhone 5, but the difference is slight, and you couldn't tell that by looking at the display, because the display on the iPhone 5 shows all colours more vividly. Mine is also noticeably warmer (more amber) than that of my 4s. In part 2 of this review, we'll look at these issues further, and how they affect editing photos in apps.

Under artificial light indoors, the iPhone 5 occasionally does better at removing the orange colour to the lights, but I couldn't provoke it to do this consistently.

Any differences in overall brightness, contrast or exposure in the images from these two phones are small enough not to worry about. The HDR feature of the camera - where it takes three photos at different brightnesses and combines the best parts of each to make a single optimised image - works in just the same way as it did on earlier models... but the iPhone 5 merges the photos into the composite picture so much faster that whole process feels a lot more practical. Both phones give the best HDR result if you tap on a darker area first. But it's still a mild HDR effect compared to that offered by apps like pro HDR.

The Verdict

The iPhone 5's camera is an evolutionary – not a revolutionary – step forward for iPhones. Whether or not you like it will depend more on your goals from photography than on its particular performance or features.

Compared to the iPhone 4s, the biggest difference is its speed. The 5 feels faster and more responsive, with a much shorter shot-to-shot time. It feels clunky to go back to using a 4s after using the 5. Its photos also show more aggressive noise reduction, but at the cost of smearing away some of the finer details. It’s a personal judgement which looks better – the detail of the 4s or the cleaner smoothness of the 5. Personally, I prefer the look of pictures from the iPhone 4s, but the speed of the iPhone 5 has already seduced me too effectively to consider going back.

If getting the best technical quality is one of your main concerns, then the compromises inherent in using any 2012-vintage smartphone camera will probably not be attractive to you.

But technical quality is only one type of quality. Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke of his camera as a “sketchpad” for recording intuition and spontaneity. He was constantly amused by what he saw as peoples' “insatiable craving” for sharpness. If you agree, consider playing with a smart phone camera for a while.

If you normally shoot with an SLR, you might be pleasantly surprised by the freedom to get lots of depth of field without a tripod – even at dusk. You might like using a small, silent, discreet camera. The flexibility added by apps and instant processing and sharing is addictive. And in daylight, the picture quality may not be as far behind your DSLR as you might expect from its size.

But you probably won't like the grain or smearing that becomes noticeable in hand-held shots below about EV5 (standard indoor brightness). You won't like its inability to get shallow depth-of-field, to zoom, to shoot raw files, or to shoot at all in light dimmer than EV-0.5.

And you'll either love or hate the way that it rings just as you're about to get the shot.

Smartphones are a different type of brush for painting photos. They have obvious drawbacks compared to dedicated cameras, and a handful of niche advantages too. I like using different brushes for different pictures. The diversity makes it an exciting time to be a photographer.

Want to get the most out of your iPhone camera? Book a place on the World's only jargon-free iPhone Photography course.

All photos are unedited unless otherwise labelled. Apple, iPhone and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Take Better Photos does not claim any endorsement by and receives no sponsorship from Apple Inc. We queued and paid normal full price for the iPhone 5. Photoshop and Lightroom are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems.