iPhone 4s vs iPhone 5: Image quality comparison tests using ProCamera

I was very excited to get my hands on the iPhone 5 this morning.

After unboxing, the most obvious thing to do was snap some pictures with ProCamera. With similar lenses and sensors, I was interested to see if there were any visible differences between the iPhone 4S and the new iPhone 5 cameras. Here is a quick overview of the technical specifications of the two phones. The differences are bolded.

Specifications	iPhone 5	iPhone 4S
Megapixels	8	8
Resolution	3264×2448	3264×2448
Focal Length	33mm	35mm
Front Camera	1.2 Megapixels	VGA

To add a little bit of rigour into my testing process, I decided to mount both iPhones to a tripod. The easiest way for me to do this was to use my Quad Lock Tripod Adapter, iPhone 4S Case and Universal Mount (stuck onto the back of my new iPhone 5 Case). You can see all three tools pictured below.

Using this system I knew that I would have both iPhones in the same position for each shot.

And here is the Quad Lock Tripod Adapter attached to a standard tripod and the iPhone 4 Case.

To further reduce any variables, both iPhones were running iOS 6 with the latest version of ProCamera (3.5.5) installed. To take the photo, I launched ProCamera and let the app set the autoexposure and focus. At no stage did I manually change any settings for any shot. No edits have been applied to the photos.

So, let’s get to the photos. There are seven of them. The iPhone 4S shot is first, then the iPhone 5 shot, followed by the 100% crop comparison.

Example 1

iPhone 4S

Example 2

iPhone 4S

Example 3

iPhone 4S

Example 4

iPhone 4S

Example 5

iPhone 4S

Example 6

iPhone 4S

Example 7

iPhone 4S

Observations

It’s early days but a few things I’ve noticed are:

1. I like the wider focal length of the iPhone 5 lens (previously 35mm now 33mm).
2. The iPhone 5 is much more responsive, with faster app load times.
3. Images look better on the iPhone 5 screen, they have more contrast and better colour replication (probably to do with the new sRGB support).
4. The iPhone 5 images seem to be holding more detail during day time shots – particularly visible in the Example 1 flower detail and building lines in Example 3.
5. The iPhone 5 seems to be more sensitive in low-light conditions. However, it appears that more aggressive noise reduction is resulting in mushier images when viewed at 100% (visible in Examples 6 and 7).

What do you think about the images? I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or experiences shooting with the iPhone 5 below.