Wesley's Tool-Box

There's been an uptick in interest in viewing contents in 3D due to many movies being created and shown in 3D format and televisions adding 3D support to accommodate them. Unfortunately, you need wear a specialized pair of glasses in order to see these 3D contents, making the experience cumbersome. Hence the glasses-free methods are being sought after. There have been some success with this in the handhelds due to needing only one set of eyes to care for, such as the Nintendo 3DS.

While Nintendo 3DS employs an active solution that uses head-tracking, a passive method that uses lenticular lenses exists as well. EyeFly3D is bringing the latter to the smartphones, so that anyone with a compatible device can enjoy 3D contents without wearing any glasses. It's certainly an intriguing concept, and as luck would have it, TodaysPPC provided me with a sample that was compatible with my iPhone 5S with the condition that I write a review. So I eagerly took upon the request.

As you can see here, the EyeFly3D package looks nearly the same as what you would get when you order a set of a regular screen protection film. That's because the product itself is just that - a screen protection film. It just has the added benefit of enabling glasses-free 3D viewing with the use of the lenticular lenses. To avoid redundancy and maximize the effect of the lenses, one is instructed to remove any existing screen protectors before installation.


You can see the blurring effects of the lenticular lenses here, which makes it evident that the regular film covers the area outside where the display is supposed to be. You'll also notice the black tape with the EyeFly3D logo on it that covers the bottom of the film. This is an important feature that we'll see in action shortly.

Apple introduced low-light photo mode on iPhone 5, enabling the device to boost the ISO to 3200 in order to take brighter photos in the dark. The quality was obviously grainy, but at least you would be taking a recognizable photo. Default camera app would slow the shutter speed down only to 1/15s, while 3rd party apps that could go into "night mode" could do 1/4s to 1s depending on the model, brightening the photo even further.

With the introduction of the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) in iPhone 6 Plus, even the default camera app could slow down to 1/4s shutter speed because the OIS was expected to compensate. As I confirmed in my review, this definitely helped enhancing the low-light photo quality. But I came to notice a strange behaviour after trying to take a lot of photos in dark places.

In a really dark place, iPhone 6 Plus camera maxes out at ISO 2000 and 1/2 seconds, as you can see here. You can either set this manually if the camera app supports iOS 8 API, or automatically if the app supports the night mode. The ProCamera 8 app that I used has both modes. After noting the brightness of the objects in the preview screen, I took a snapshot.


But the photo came out quite darker than the preview. To see why, I checked the EXIF data. It showed that the camera limited itself to ISO 500 and 1/4s shutter speed instead of the ISO 2000 and 1/2s setting that I set. To see if the high ISO mode wasn't working, I manually set the ISO to 2000 in a brighter room, resulting in a much faster shutter speed. The camera had no problem obeying the ISO setting in this case. Then I tried the ISO 500 and 1/8s setting to take a photo in the dark. The result was that the actual settings decided by the camera was ISO 250 and 1/4s.

It seems that, when the camera feels that it's in a low-light environment, it automatically decreases the shutter speed to 1/4 seconds and use as low ISO as possible, and only up to 500. The manual settings are overridden. Most camera apps in the App Store that support manual settings or night mode seem to be affected by this. I've seen the same problem in VSCO Cam, Manually - Manual Focus Camera, and ProShot, so it's definitely not a bug in the individual app.

I've checked for this problem with the other iPhone 6 Plus units and they exhibited the same behaviour, while the iPhone 5S did not have this problem. I'm suspecting that the OIS function that allowed the 1/4s shutter speed in the default mode may be the culprit. I've filed a bug report to Apple. The issue has been observed in iOS 8.0, 8.0.2, 8.1, and 8.1.1 beta.

P.S. If you do need to take low-light photos on the iPhone 6 Plus right now, there is one series of apps that seem to be either unaffected by or circumventing this problem that you can use - NightCap (both regular and Pro versions).