Wesley's Tool-Box

I've cracked the back side of an iPhone when it was made of glass, but never the front side. That changed with iPhone 6 Plus - the screen got hairline cracks when the device was dropped from about 50cm (1 1/2 feet) high onto a brick road. Getting an iPhone bought overseas serviced by an Apple designated service center in Korea isn't possible due to local warranty (as opposed to world-wide), so I looked for other ways to get this fixed.


This is when I found this "Screen Glue" manufactured by DiYPRO which claimed to fix screen cracks by filling the gaps with a UV-curing glue. The package, which costs about US$17, comes with 5 ml of the glue and a sheet of instructions. Frankly, the price seemed steep for the amount of glue provided, but if it could get the job done, I thought it wasn't too bad. So I bought a bottle and got to work.

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).

With iOS 8, apps can now provide individual manual control of ISO, shutter speed, focus, exposure, and white balance using public API. Apps that take advantage of this can bring fine-grained control of the cameras on the iPhone, a much sought feature by the users especially since iPhone's cameras perform so well. Now, there's a bit of problem with low light mode in iPhone 6 Plus, but that's another story.

The story here is that I used the iPhone 6 Plus camera on manual settings to take a photo of the Moon that's showing through a pair of Bushnell Birding Series 8x40 binoculars. Without them, the Moon would have come out as a tiny blob about 25 pixels wide. I held up the phone to the ocular lens by hand. It's not as impressive as the 50x zoom photos that my Canon SX50 HS can take, but it give me hope that some low-magnification astrophotography could be done with my iPhone with some clever apps and a clamp that can fix the phone to the binoculars.

Device: iPhone 6 Plus & Bushnell Birding Series 8x40
Settings : 29mm - ISO 50 - 1/125s - f/2.2
Filters: None
Time : 2014-11-03 01:34 KST
Location: Naju, Korea