iPhone 5 Does Have Different Image Sensor To iPhone 4S
Dpreview.com are reporting today the iPhone 5 does indeed have a different image sensor to the iPhone 4S. ”Close examination shows the iPhone 5 is using a 4.1 mm lens to give a 33 mm equivalent field of view, rather than the 4S’s 4.3 mm lens, which gave a 35 mm equivalent view’. They have determined this information by looking at the EXIF data of two images, one of their own taken with the iPhone 4S and the other from Apple taken with the iPhone 5. In tests the iPhone 4S selected ISO 64 whilst the iPhone 5 dropped down to ISO 50, inferring ‘the newer model has a lower minimum sensitivity’.
Effectively what this means is that the new sensor in the iPhone 5 is just a tiny fraction larger.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
One Comment
Mike Hardaker (Jag.gr)
It’s not really possible to deduce anything much about the sensor from the EXIF data. The lens may be different (although even that’s not certain); its focal length is certainly being reported as 4.13mm instead of 4.28mm.
However, iPhone 4S’s 4.28mm lens has a full-frame equivalent of 32.5mm (not the 35mm that Apple writes to the EXIF data) and a 4.13mm lens is equivalent to 31.4mm (not 33mm) so it just goes to show that you can’t trust EXIF data! Maybe the lens is different; maybe it’s just being reported more (or less!) accurately…
Also, the ISO limits are really defined at the level of the OS, so an ISO 50 setting really tells us little if anything about the sensor behind it all.
If the lens is slightly wider (as iPhone 4’s lens is wider than iPhone 4S’s), that still doesn’t say anything about the sensor size being different.