On the face of it, the camera of the iPhone 3GS is pretty poor. For those that care about megapixels, it has significantly less than other phones. It doesn’t even have flash, unlike the K750i phone I had back in 2005. And despite the ability to select your point of focus and exposure, it’s still tricky to get a good quality image from the thing.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s still a great, great camera for two reasons:
- apps (eg in-built editing)
- connectivity
Apps
There are loads of really great photo apps now available that make the general crappiness of the inbuilt camera work for you. My current favourites include:
Lo-mob (£1.19)
My newest find, but also my best. The app let you apply a couple of dozen effects like a through the viewfinder look, vintage Polaroid or, as below, 35mm shot in a medium format camera:
ShakeitPhoto (£0.59)
The best fake-Polaroid app out there, for my money. The piece de resistance is that when you shake the iPhone, the picture develops before your eyes, which never gets old.
Best Camera, CameraBag and PerfectPhoto are all worth a look too. They all offer a different look and it’s worth experimenting with them to see which you’d want to use in different situations.
Connectivity
Take the photo, drop it into an app to get the look you want and email it to your friends, or for wider impact, Posterous (which’ll autopost up to Flickr, Twitter, etc.). Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded, but this still seems amazing to me. I know MMS has been around for ages so we’ve been able to send photos to each other over the air for a while, but it wasn’t until devices like the iPhone came about that we reached a tipping point in ease of use.
Now I suppose other smartphones have similar levels of connectivity, but with them you’re stuck with the normal badly exposed, grainy shots you just took. Combine the iPhone’s connectivity with its ability to actually produce worthwhile material and you’re onto a real winner.
