The iPhone 4S versus the Canon 5D Mark II

This is perhaps a topic that has been discussed at length – but its worth noting how far Camera Phones have come in the last 12 months. I was at Victoria Harbour on the weekend, and was shooting some time lapse images. While waiting for my time lapse sequence to finish shooting, I decided to shoot the scene with my camera phone. Now, for the record, I use an iPhone 4S, and the camera on this phone is amazing for what it is. I’m sure that this is not something new to you all. Its been reviewed several times on every technology and photography blog that is out there.

I had to see for myself – exactly how much difference was there. And what better time to test it out for real? I mean, I was there in perfect conditions (soft even light, no wind, and a good scene to shoot). So I decided to pull both images of their respective devices and compare them straight out of camera side by side.

Now, its safe to say that this is not a fair comparison. The iPhone is, for all practical purposes, a point-and-shoot camera with little scope for long exposure photography in the state that it was available to me at the time.

The Canon 5D Mark II that I shoot with has a good quality 17-40mm wide angle lens and had a neutral density filter attached to it, and was shooting at about a 0.6s exposure time at f/22 with a +0.3 step exposure bias.

The image above is a side by side comparison with the wide angle image from the Canon zoomed in and cropped to align with the image from the iPhone. The true test however, is the full resolution images.

Note that the two images have no post processing and are both JPEGs. The file from the Canon might take a while to load (fairly large file), compared to the one from the iPhone. What are your thoughts?

Generally speaking, I am not about to trade my SLR in for a camera phone in the foreseeable future, but the comparison does serve as a reminder that at times when you don’t have your Digital SLR with you – never forget about your camera phone. You might find that it takes better pictures than you expect! I, like so many other of its users, can definitely vouch for camera on the iPhone 4S! You might like to check out what the image taken with the Canon 5D Mark II turned out like.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 at 6:49 am. It is filed under Blog, Reviews and tagged with Australia, Canon 5D Mark II, compare iPhone to SLR, Docklands, iPhone, iPhone 4S, iPhone Photography, Melbourne, Oceania, Victoria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.