“We’ve heard that there are indeed two different models of iPhone coming out next month (announced this month?),” Seth Weintraub reports for 9to5Mac.
“We still think October 7th is the scheduled release date give or take any delays,” Weintraub reports. “The low-end model, which is essentially an iPhone 4 look-alike (glass front and back), is rolling off the assembly line in big numbers right now… These will be priced aggressively and be everywhere. They will also be offered in both prepaid and post paid plans.”
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Weintraub reports, “It appears that the tear-drop shaped iPhone 5 with larger screen and thinner, rounder body is seeing continued design and production delays… We therefore think that iPhone 5 will be delayed slightly at the very least and may see shortages all the way into 2012. The iPhone 5 itself is a sight to behold, we’ve been told… The camera rivals point and shoot cameras and will be a major marketing point for this device.”
Read more in the full article here.
To rival P&S cameras, optics dictates that the chip sensor be larger, which means the distance between lens and focal plane has to widen. Essentially, the area of the iPhone around the lens has to thicken. That’s not going to happen, so I have my doubts about that.
As for the prepaid iPhone, I can more easily imagine that the glass back on the iPhone4 goes away, to make it cheaper and more durable.
Couldn’t you pull more light with convex glass on the outside and then spread the light with convex glass on the inside, allowing a larger chip sensor with the same distance between lens and focal plane?
Then you could mitigate the design issues with convex glass by using a fresnel lens instead. There might be issues with distortion on the chip, but you could mitigate that with software…
I’m no expert, so maybe not. But it’s not immediately obvious to me why this couldn’t be so.
I am no expert, but I have been looking into this topic a bit because I am considering purchasing a DLSR camera.
KenC hit the key points – sensor size and optics. The area of the sensor on a typical point-and-shoot camera is roughly five times that of a typical phone camera sensor. If you go to a DSLR, you gain another order of magnitude in sensor area. Unless someone has significantly increased the sensitivity and decreased the noise in camera phone sensors, you are only going to get decent photos under reasonable lighting conditions, especially when the incoming light is spread across many megapixels. When you go indoors and the camera boosts the detector gain, image noise is amplified, as well. That is one reason why a larger number of megapixels is not necessarily better. All things being equal, a larger number of pixels will enable a larger image/print with the desired sharpness. But I would generally rather have a low-noise 5MP image than a higher noise 8MP image.
Under low light conditions, a fewer number of larger pixels means that each pixel receives a greater share of the incoming photons, enabling a higher shutter speed for motion shots, lower gain/noise for still shots at the maximum aperture, and greater control over depth of field by reducing aperture without increasing gain/noise.
Those big DSLR lenses capture more light, enabling very fast shutter speeds and better low-light shots without a flash. Incidentally, I often see flashes being used in the stands at indoor events. Turn off the flash if you want to get the best possible image (which may not be very good, anyway). Even pro flashes won’t illuminate the action from long distance, and most point-and-shoot flashes are good for only 8 to 12 feet. You image will come out dark because your camera is expecting the flash to illuminate the subject, and it doesn’t.
The following Wikipedia article has some very useful information for anyone who wants to know more about digital camera sensor formats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format
The claim that the iPhone’s tiny sensor and simple lens will “rival point and shoot cameras” is pure advertising hype. Ain’t gonna happen. Not in a million years.
However, the average person’s powers of discrimination are very poorly developed. The fact that iPhone photos are so numerous on Flickr proves the point. Most people either can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Let’s not forget that, before digital cameras became popular, most people routinely settled for absolutely wretched prints from the corner drugstore without complaint.
Not true at all. An iPhone 4 photo is perfectly capable of being enlarged to A4 without significant loss of quality, especially when taken under good lighting conditions. And what do you mean by point-and-shoot anyway? A 35mm film camera? If so, a 35mm 400ISO print will struggle at A4, because of the grain. A 5Mp iPhone image will have little digital noise under normal daylight conditions. I trained as a scanner operator on Crosfield 6250 drum scanners, and did photoshop retouching on scans and digital images from the mid-90’s, so I do actually have a clue as to what I’m talking about.
Um, you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t know what a point & shoot (P&S) camera is? The term P&S refers to all those small digital cameras that are pocketable, have a non-interchangeable lens and usually no optical viewfinder. A 35mm film SLR is definitely NOT a P&S. Anyway, most P&S’s produce pretty good results under good lighting, but recently image quality is generally going backwards because of the trend towards more pixels, while at the same time keeping the sensor the same size. A Digital SLR camera has a much bigger sensor and along with a host of other improvements has the potential to produce way better photos, particularly under difficult conditions. And yes, I too doubt very much that the iPhone 5 will produce images anywhere near as good as most P&S cameras can. It’ll have too many pixels for a teeny-tiny sensor and very poor optics in front of that sensor. But, just as most people are happy to listen to crap quality audio files, they’re also happy with crap images too most of the time.
Hello. That’s me.
Higher a professional if I want superior pics. The rest are just visual memories. No need to be fancy.
I love rumored delays of a rumored product.
thats because analysts are never wrong, therefor, the dates they originally picked were correct, and any release date beyond that, is a delay by Apple.
Can’t have a delay on a product that Apple would say does not exist.
I think Michael was be satirical , and he was quite funny
re: KenC
Rival P&S cameras, eh? Yeah, that would take some extra apple magic. Perhaps they’ve figured out how to fold the optical path like in my Exilim EX-V8, which might only be for zooming… Yet, I’ve heard they’re using Sony camera parts and Sony is the proud producer of the “world’s thinnest camera”, cleverly named, “the TX55”. I’m going to go ahead and hold my breath on this one because I think apple does more with less, like in the iPhone4 camera, which in my mind already rivals P&S cameras.
A mobile phone camera will never rival a point and shoot camera without a larger, better lens. It doesn’t matter the sensor, without the optics you’re never going to achieve the same quality.
It’s just like having a top of the line stereo and connecting it to crappy speakers. The sound processing may be fantastic, but the output still sounds like Fischer-Price.
Agreed that a camera phone doesn’t spec out anywhere close to a mid-range point & shoot. But I suspect that the vast improvement in phone cameras in the last year has already measurably impacted P&S sales. I doubt I will be looking at upgrading my P&S anytime soon because of my camera phone.
I just came back from a vacation during which I had my high-end P&S and my iPhone 4. Guess which one took most of the photos? The iPhone. It was handy, quicker to access… and took great shots. The most serious drawback to camera phones for the casual shooter is the lack of variable focal length.
The popularity of iPhone photos speaks to the fact that the “best” camera is the one you always have with you. It’s hard to believe that anyone who cared even slightly about image quality would reach for an iPhone instead of a “high-end P&S” if you had both cameras with you at the time.