Pocket Plastic

I've been a little too busy with work lately to post more, but I did get an iPhone 4 a few weeks ago when it launched here in Singapore, so I'd like to talk a little bit about that.

Every camera app I've tried has worked, with the exception of Pro HDR, which made my iPhone restart itself. It may have been caused by something else, but I haven't risked trying it again.

The sensor on this model is so much better than the one I had with the 3GS. It was almost worth upgrading for the light sensitivity alone. The following photo is a straight-from-camera panorama created with Autostitch ($2.99), from the 63rd-storey rooftop of a building in the downtown business district. With an iPhone 3GS, it would have been a black canvas peppered with faint spots of light. With the iPhone 4, it's much closer to what your eye would see.

After that, it's trivial to boost the brightness and exposure in post-processing with little loss of quality.

The downside of this increased sensitivity and wider dynamic range is that most camera apps won't give you the results you're accustomed to. ShakeItPhoto ($0.99) was fantastic on the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, but started putting out darker photos with the 3GS – a quirk its creator unfortunately never addressed. On the iPhone 4, ShakeItPhoto has gone the other way: too bright and colorful, to the point where photos no longer have the vintage look the app was intended to produce.

Some app developers are realizing and reacting to this, and hopefully we'll see some updates restoring normality soon. Plastic Bullet ($1.99) received a major 1.1 update yesterday, and one of the items in the changelog noted tweaks to the processing algorithms to take the iPhone 4 camera's characteristics into consideration. That's setting a fine example, and I hope others like Camerabag, Hipstamatic, and Lo-Mob ($1.99 each) follow suit.

On the other hand, exposure enhancement tools like PerfectlyClear ($2.99) are almost unnecessary now, the exception being an extremely dark photo where the LED flash wasn't engaged – but results in such situations are bound to be terrible anyway.

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Another change is the wider field of vision with this new lens/sensor combination; some say it's equivalent to a 28mm lens in 35mm film terms. This is a welcome improvement, but I know some people love to get up close by zooming when using a proper camera, and might be tempted to use iOS4's built-in digital zoom feature. That's not such a good idea for obvious reasons, but if one must have digital zoom, the version implemented in Camera+ ($1.99) produces higher quality resampling than Apple's.

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Back to the subject of panoramas, the addition of a gyroscope has made greater stitching accuracy possible by supplying apps with precise information about the difference in camera position between captures. One app that shows this potential is You Gotta See This! ($1.99), which takes a different approach to the visual presentation of panoramas: laying down individual photos, overlapping each other, to produce a haphazard collage-look reminiscent of David Hockney's work. But using it is delightfully simple: simply stretch out your arm and pan it about to capture a complete scene – you'll see the viewfinder moving about on the inside of a spherical grid, tracking your motions directly on a 1:1 scale.

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Those are my main threads of thought concerning new camera developments with regards to the iPhone 4; I probably missed something but there's always another post around the corner. Physically, the camera body is much more comfortable to hold now while shooting in landscape. I always had to exert a little extra finger force to keep the rounded edges of the 3G/3GS firmly in hand; the flat sides now are almost effortless to hold (but the outcome is so much worse should you drop it). I got myself a Case-Mate "Tough" case, which combines a silicone inner sleeve with a textured, rubber-coated ABS outer shell, which gives much-improved grip on the phone.