Apple iPhone 5S camera samples: is this the new smartphone gold standard?

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Apple iPhone 5S camera samples: is this the new smartphone gold standard?
The Apple iPhone 5S comes with a vastly improved 8-megapixel camera - with a bigger sensor that captures more light and a new wider aperture lens.

While all that might sound complicated the actual photo samples taken with the new camera tell the whole story right away, and you can find them right at the bottom of this article.

So, what’s new about the iPhone 5S’ iSight camera? 

Dual LED flash


Now, there’s one difference that you can tell right away and that’s the dual LED flash. Usually photos taken with the flash on are colder and just don’t look natural, but Apple claims to have improved on this and now the camera will actually measure the color temperature before it fires.

Then, there is one white and one amber LED light that fire providing the right color for natural skin tones and great colors even with the flash on.

Larger sensor


Next, Apple brings a 15% larger sensor that will capture more light. The aperture is f/2.2, wider than the f/2.4 on earlier iPhones and again allowing more light in. All of this combines to allow better images in low light and more stable ones in daylight. To make things better, Apple actually captures multiple shots when you press the shutter key and selects the sharpest image. The camera does not feature optical image stabilization, but this improvement should improve things with shaky hands and blurry pictures.

On to the new features, there’s now faster burst shot mode capturing 10 frames per second. That’s particularly useful for sports shoots when objects move faster and you want to capture that one perfect moment.


For video, Apple brings traditional 1080p full HD video recording at 30 frames per second, but also adds two neat options. The first one is slow-motion video recording at 120fps for a Matrix-like twist to your videos, and the second one is 3x live zoom while you record regular (non slo-mo) video.

Finally, we’ll let the actual iPhone 5S camera samples tell the whole story themselves. We have six downsized images that will load faster, and the next six are the same pictures in their full-resolution glory for you to explore every detail. So what do you think, is this the new smartphone camera gold standard?

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