Review: Apple iPhone 5s

Review: Apple iPhone 5s

Apple's iPhone 5 is the most popular camera on photo-sharing site Flickr and its successor looks set to follow suit. One of the reasons is probably the camera's ease of use.

With iOS 7, iPhone 5s' native camera app is even more intuitive. Just swipe the display to move between modes (square/picture/panorama). The Volume Up button also works as a shutter release.

Camera settings, other than Flash and HDR, cannot be changed. This may frustrate some, but it makes the phone a convenient "point and shoot" device.

Photos shot in bright sunlight were razor sharp with vivid colour reproduction. No doubt this is due to the camera's intelligent use of a very low ISO 32 sensitivity setting. Here, the iPhone 5s loses out only to the Nokia Lumia 1020.

In fact, even in low-lighting conditions, the iPhone uses no more than ISO 500, whereas others in this shoot-out go more than ISO 1,600.

So even when taken without a flash, the pictures had great details and accurate skintones.

The much-touted True Tone dual-LED flash uses a white and amber light to match different lighting conditions and preserve accurate skin tones.

However, the flash is not very powerful, so the pictures looked a tad underexposed.

The HDR function is so weak that darker areas of the photos still looked too dark.

But the iPhone 5s has the best panorama feature among the lot. Not only is it easy to use, the resulting pictures are also well stitched and correctly exposed - unlike shots from other smartphones, which tended to be overexposed in parts.

If you dislike fiddling with camera controls, shoot mostly in good light and love superb panoramic photos, the iPhone 5s is a good bet.


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