Austin Mann recently got hold of the new iPhone 6 Plus after Apple’s Keynote at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California. In partnership with The Verge, he set out on an amazing adventure through Iceland with the phone in tow. His reason? He wanted to put the iPhone 6 Plus camera through the test to see how much has improved since the iPhone 5s. His results? From focus pixels, focus control, time-lapse and slo-mo, Apple has made all the right improvements and innovations with their iSight camera. The new features are “enabling iPhone users to better capture and share life” says Mann.
The new focus pixel technology is super-fast and great in low light, resulting in sharp pictures and intelligent auto-focusing - even in extreme low light situations. Exposure control has been around in various incarnations in other apps, but Apple seems to have nailed it within the new Camera app negating the "need to lock exposure on the brightest area of a scene and then reframe" as Austin puts it. The auto-exposure and auto-focus lock allows for shallow depth of field shots which are especially useful for macro photography allowing you to move closer or farther away to nail focus with beautiful background blur. The dynamic range seems better in the iPhone 6 and there's a higher resolution in panoramas - over 53% (43 megapixels from 28 on the iPhone 5s) - giving users the ability to print large, good looking, sharp images with extra detail than one can get with a single 8 megapixel image. These sound like some seriously awesome upgrades to me... now I just have to figure out which provider to buy one through!
You can read all about Austin's Icelandic adventure and see some amazing side-by-side comparisons and time-lapse and continuous focus test videos at the full article on Austin's blog.
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Lucky to go there to photograph.
They must try winter also to see if still it works at minus 20C
Interesting bias you're displaying by saying how great and super awesome this new phone is yet I don't see you making any articles saying how great the cameras on a Sony or Samsung are.
Alden, you're so right! If you write an article about one phone's camera it's not fair that the other phone companies are not represented with an article and video.
It's not like the iPhone 6 is particularily relevant because it was just released or anything. You make such a good point that maybe Fstoppers could hire you to go to Iceland with Sony and Samsung phones so they can write an article about them. I hope Blackberry doesn't notice their phone won't have an article.
I'm a big fan of sarcasm.
Awesome.
nice!
I love pushing it to the limits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=votBDwhTu1E
OK, sorry. I had to do that. Now that we've got that out of the way...
I had to admit that the footage is impressive and beautiful. I'd love to see more BTS footage on how it was edited; stabilization, color correction, rigs for "steady cam" - and just captions to let us know what footage was recorded with what device. Still though, some impressive feats from something that also receives phone calls... it does still do that, right?