From Michael Carr,
Your Guide to Digital Cameras.
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This Apple iPhone camera review covers the usefulness and quality of the camera features on the Apple iPhone. The Apple iPhone camera is great for viewing and sharing photos, but it has some issues when it comes to the most important thing: taking pictures. Find out more in this Apple iPhone camera review.

Apple iPhone as Camera Phone

This Apple iPhone camera review covers the usefulness and quality of the camera features on the Apple iPhone. The Apple iPhone camera is great for viewing and sharing photos, but it has some issues when it comes to the most important thing: taking pictures.

While there might be a ton of buzz about the Apple iPhone, the camera really isn't terribly impressive (even for a camera phone). There are certainly camera phones that have more megapixels, and phones that have more features. In fact, the AT&T Tilt has a much better camera.

Image Quality with Apple iPhone Camera Pictures

The iPhone camera wasn’t a last minute add-on the to the iPhone, but it certainly wasn’t anything Apple put a lot of thought or development into. The 2-megapixel camera is just that, a camera. No flash and no zoom.

The camera acts like a webcam, which means you get a disorienting view while trying to shoot. There is also a substantial lag between pressing the icon to shoot, and the image being shot (with a fun shutter image displayed on the screen). Don’t expect to take any great action photos of your kids, pets or anything to do with sports.

Shots taken in the evening or in low light come out quite blurry and grainy.

The camera does do a nice job if you’re taking shot of friends or anything that doesn’t move too much during good lighting conditions. In fact, it reproduces bright colors surprisingly well for a camera phone. If something isn't moving, you can expect a great image from your camera phone.

Apple iPhone Camera's Selling Point: Sharing and Viewing

Once you have your pictures taken, the iPhone does make them easy to view and share. The iPhone actually has one of the best systems on a camera phone for viewing and sharing, and it is both slick and easy to use.

It almost seems as though the best planning went into this end of the camera phone, with much less resources placed in the image capture side of things.

You can use the photo as a wallpaper, assign it to a contact or email the photo to a friend. You can also upload your photos directly to Google’s Picasa to share photos with family and friends. Another nice feature on the iPhone is the ability to view your photos in a slideshow.

The image size uploaded to your computer is at 1600x1200, but if you email the photo directly from the iPhone, the size will be reduced to 640x480.

You can also zoom in on a section of the photo, and the method is very user-friendly. You can simply take finger and thumb, touch the screen, and spread apart to zoom in. To zoom out, you simply touch screen with finger and thumb and squeeze together.