Wesley's Tool-Box

Earlier, I've looked at how iPhone 6 Plus improved upon the image quality of the iPhone 5S. But it's not just the end result that's gotten better, but the process to get there, as well. Apple takes the whole photographing experience very seriously. One of the major improvements come in the form of the so-called "Focus Pixels", a marketing term for phase detection autofocus.

Traditionally, casual cameras employed contrast detection, which tries to pick out where the highest contrast difference between the pixels happens. Meanwhile, film cameras & DSLRs used the phase detection, which has the light from the subject split into two and tries to find where they become in-phase. The latter works well with continuous autofocusing, as well as in darker environments where contrast is less distinct.


In practice, the Focus Pixels provides the much-needed speed and accuracy improvements to the iPhone's autofocus. As you can see in the picture and the video above, iPhone 6 Plus locks onto the foreground subject's focus very fast and continuously. In contrast (no pun intended), iPhone 5S often does not respond to the movements of the foreground object.

When the iPhone 5S does detect the changes, the camera needs to move the focus back and forth, taking more time to find the right focus. In my experience with all the iPhones up to 5S, this occasionally results in focusing onto a wrong subject, even when I specifically selected the subject on the touch screen. This annoyance is no more on the iPhone 6 Plus.

What this means is that I'm now far less likely to have an out-of-focus snapshot even in a hurry. And I don't have to tell the iPhone to focus on something as often. A true "point and shoot", if you will.

It's already well known that iPhone's camera's quality usually ranks among the best in smartphones. iPhone 5S was no exception, so I wanted to see how iPhone 6 Plus could improve upon that. Naturally, I did a side-by-side photo shoot with the two phones for a few days and this is the result. All the photos here are cropped from the original resolution.

In the daytime shootings, the two performs more or less similarly at a casual glance. As you can see above, the details of the photos are very good and nearly identical to each other. I think it's a testament to how good the iPhone 5S already was.


That is not to say that iPhone 6 Plus hadn't had any improvements to introduce. As you can see in this photo, the details of the leaves receiving the sunshine are preserved better with the iPhone 6 Plus. Result from iPhone 5S looks more washed out despite having a slightly faster shutter speed. This shows that the dynamic range of the sensor has been enhanced. This is a good news if you don't want the somewhat unnatural look the HDR mode produces.

As my iPhone 6 Plus came home safely, the screen & backside protector set and the belt case, both of which I ordered online earlier, had arrived as well. It meant that I would be able to protect and carry the device from day one. And thus, I proceeded to get the box opened.


And this is the unboxing video I took. The honour of actually opening the box went to my daughter Celine. She's getting good with handling tools nowadays. Other than the fact that the iPhone itself was really big, everything else was quite similar. I suppose you don't need to change what works well.

Celine and I had some fun making light trails at home during the night. The whole thing was spontaneous, but the results were pretty good. There weren't so much to prepare. All I needed to do was to have my iPhone 5S shoot at 1/2 second shutter speed, while Celine swung this LED-equipped electric fan all over the place.

If you buy a phone with camera function in Korea, you'll notice that taking a photo will produce a shutter sound even if you set the phone to vibrate or silent mode. This is because of a government recommendation set in 2004 to have phones always make a sound louder than 65dB when a photo is taken, to curb spy shots and boost privacy.

iPhones are no exception, and if you buy one in Korea, the silent mode switch does nothing to, uh, silence the shutter sound. This is interesting because iPhones are generally not differentiated except for slight variation in CDMA or LTE support.

(ADDENDUM: The situation seems to be the same for the iPhones bought in Japan or the Philippines.)

The question, then, would be if this shutter sound is controlled on a carrier / region basis or device basis. If it's controlled by detecting what carrier or region it's being used, then taking the phone outside Korea would silence the shutter sound. If it's preconfigured on the device, whether or not the sound will persist would depend on where you originally bought it from. So which is it?