iOS 4.1′s HDR Photo, We Think it’s Great, Do You?
September 16, 2010 | Andy Boxall
If there was one feature of iOS 4.1 that we didn’t expect to cause much heated debate, it was HDR photos. This is something that was added to the iPhone 4′s camera for free and isn’t all that different from other tweaks like face or smile recognition, in that it’s a software bonus that you can turn off if you don’t like it. Even better is that you can choose to save both a standard picture and the HDR image, so if you leave it on and still don’t like it, you just delete it.
But no, arguments on the positive and negative aspects of HDR rage. Fine, but to us, HDR looks to be a perfect addition to the iPhone 4, which is remember, a phone with a camera designed to take incidental pictures by anyone, at anytime. If you have the choice between two shots, you pick the best, and you’re happy. You want better, you use a standalone camera.
This morning, we took four pictures with the iPhone 4, which you can see below in both HDR and non-HDR form. To truly judge between them, you have to enlarge them and not go by just the thumbnails, however we’ve kept them at full size, so be prepared for the picture to load. The results are as expected, sometimes the HDR looks better, sometimes not, but even if one image out of 50 is improved, it seems like good value to us!
We would love to see your own HDR/non-HDR examples, so if you have them saved to Flickr or similar, pop the link in the comments and share them!
Either way the camera on the iPhone 4 is really great. I like the option of being able to use HDR. Many times it makes a good photo even better.
I second that. Particularly in low light conditions I wouldn't want to miss it.
I am amazed there’s such angst. I’ve taken nearly 100 photos with HDR on my iPhone 4 and have been so amazed on how it improves just about every photo that I turned off the ‘save the non-HDR’ feature. HDR so dramatically improves indoor, outdoor, low light, bright light, close and far away photos that it is like i’m not even looking at a photo but through a window. It does seem that the more light avail, the better it works. So, I guess it doesn’t matter much that it can’t be enabled if the LED flash is on.
This is interesting, but it would have been much more interesting if we could look at the pictures side-by-side instead of one at a time.
Sorry, i don't get the idea of HDR on a phone camera. HDR arguably is for pro and semipro photographers, camera phones find themselves on the other end of the scale. Those who want decent images, will always fall back to a proper camera.