Jul 10 2009
Capturing movies and photos on the iPhone 3GS
As we’ve mentioned in our iPhone 3GS review today, the smartphone captures decent images and movies with its 3.2-megapixel camera. It has a really intuitive way of letting you focus as well. You simply need to tap on the desired part of the image onscreen:
The square above indicates the area I’ve tapped onscreen. On the top right, you’ll see a slider to switch between video and camera mode.
The camera churns out great photos in daylight or well-lit areas despite its relatively low resolution:
Images in low-light conditions tend to suffer from some visible noise as you can see below – but it’s a general limitation of such cameras in phones:
Here’s a typical food shot in an environment with very low lighting (hey, it was closing time). The iPhone manages to pump up the exposure so that your subject is visible:
The 3GS captures VGA-quality video and also allows you to choose an area to focus on as well, just like in picture mode. This opens up creative ways in which you can capture footage. In our example below, we used its macro focus to limit the depth of field, so you can see details on the raindrops and the texture of the car door’s faux-leather trimming:
Note that the videos on this blog have been compressed because they’ve been uploaded to YouTube straight from the iPhone. As with the camera mode, the quality of the video does tend to suffer when you’re in low-light environments, with visual noise becoming rather visible:
If you’d like to see the full quality of the footage that we’ve captured, download it from here.
