Review: iPhone 3GS
Camera
This is one area where the iPhone 3GS hands-down beats the previous two iPhones. Both the iPhone and iPhone 3G had fixed-focus 2 megapixel cameras. The iPhone 3GS has a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus (though still no flash). It takes picture-taking to a whole new level for this device.
Much of the way the camera behaves is unchanged. Open it up and you see the entire screen becomes the viewfinder. Press the little on-screen shutter button to take a picture. The way the new camera works is a box will appear on the screen automatically. If you don't do anything, the iPhone 3GS will focus on whatever is in that box. Focusing takes about 1-2 seconds, and then capturing the image is almost immediate once you press the shutter button.
If the iPhone isn't focusing on what you want it to focus on, no worries. Just press the object on the screen that you want the phone to focus on, and it will focus on that instead. To be fair, some of Apple's competitors have offered a similar feature on cameraphones, but this feature works really well on the iPhone 3GS.
Once pictures are captured, they'll automatically be stored in the camera roll / gallery application.
Gallery
The gallery application is mostly unchanged. One new feature we noticed is that when scrolling through the thumbnails in the gallery, you are now able to select batches of pictures and perform actions with them. In the lower left corner of the screen, there's the little icon that Apple uses for "sharing". Press that, and you'll be able to place check marks in multiple pictures at once. When done selecting images, they can be shared, copied, or deleted en masse. This means that emailing (or deleting) several pictures at once just got a lot easier.
Otherwise, it's easy to set up slide shows, flick through your images, and zoom in to examine them in more detail.
Photo Quality
Compared to previous models, the new iPhone does indeed take better-looking photos in most situations. Whereas previous models had a tendency to produce slightly washed-out and/or bluish photos, the new model captures photos with notably higher contrast and a warmer tone. The biggest improvement is with indoor, low-light photos, which often have dramatically better exposure and less noise. Photos from previous models also tended to be blurry toward the edges, and this has been fixed. The 3GS produces photos that are crisp and detailed from corner to corner. (See the "garden (detail)" sample photos.)
Below are two galleries of matching photos, one set taken with the iPhone 3G (the old model), and the other set taken with the iPhone 3G S (the new model).
The touch-to-focus feature controls not only focus, but light metering (brightness), and it can make a dramatic difference when capturing scenes with a mix of bright and dim areas. Now you can tell your iPhone to pay attention to your friend in the shadows instead of the bright sky, and it will properly expose the photo so your friend can be seen clearly.
However, the new iPhone 3GS camera does have some shortcomings, even compared to the previous models. For one, Apple may have gone a bit too far in cranking up the contrast. While the washed-out look from past models is gone, we took more than one photo with the new model where highlights and shadows were blown out (just blobs of pure white or black); the same photos taken with an iPhone 3G showed much more detail in the brightest and dimmest parts of the photo. (See the "flowers" and "produce case" sample photos.) The new model also had trouble with fluorescent light, often producing way-off color balance, and sometimes even failing to focus. We tried several times to photograph the produce case at our local convenience store, but the iPhone 3G S inexplicably failed to focus every time. The old iPhone 3G produced much sharper photos with that particular scene, and it exposed the darkest and lightest areas better as well. In all other kinds of light, though, the iPhone 3GS focused well (and quickly) and color balance was excellent.
We're not going to say that other cameraphones don't outperform it, because some certainly do. Even though some companies offer 5 megapixel shooters on hardware that costs about as much as the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone's camera is a solid contender in the 3 megapixel class. Photogs may lament the loss of detail in highlights and shadows; Apple's reluctance to offer manual controls for things like contrast is frustrating here. With that said, will it do a good job with for sharing via Facebook, MySpace and other photo services? You betcha. Will you be tempted to print out some candids of your kids and frame them? Probably.
Apple iPhone 3GS
