iPhone 5S Gets Bigger Sensor, Faster Lens, Less Crummy Flash

After all this time, the iPhone camera is still a controversial subject. Some people love it, while others hate it. But, regardless of how you feel about it, you have to admit, it’s a force to be reckoned with in terms of sheer quantity. Now, the iPhone 5S is real and it brings with it some improvements, some of which are fairly smart.

The most notable improvement to the iPhone is that the sensor is now 15% larger than that of the iPhone 5. The pixels have also grown (we’ll know by how much when the official info is out), which should mean better low-light performance. It’s also now powered by Apples A7 64-bit processor, which should help in that arena as well.

The lens is now an F/2.2, but I’m assuming that it’s going to be the same coatings that were employed for the iPhone 5, with which some people had issues with spreading purple flare.

All that new power also affords a few more new features. You can now shoot 10 fps bursts, from which the camera can automatically try and choose the best one to show you. We’d prefer to do that on our own, but 10 FPS could be cool for a variety of other reasons.

You can now also get 120 fps slow-motion video in 720p, which is actually a really cool addition and something I’d see myself using quite a bit. Probably too much for a little while, but once the novelty wears off, it will be a nifty tool.

They have also apparently made some big jumps in terms of the flash. One of the main gripes about the old flash was color temperature and how it managed to clash with seemingly every color of natural light you could possibly throw at it. The 5S has a True Tone flash which actually adjusts color temperature to make things look more appealing.

There are still more details coming out right now, so I’ll update this post as we go along. What do you think? Can this keep up with other smartphones that concentrate on cameras like the 41-megapixel Nokia Lumia 1020?

Image courtesy of the Engadget Live Blog