iPhone 5 defective camera thread (purple flare)

Update: (7-Oct-2012) Official Apple response: You're holding it wrong:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4436?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Another sample pic of the purple flare via CNET:

http://asset2.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/10/07/photo_%2817%29_610x413.jpg

Update: Official Apple response from Engineering:

1. This is normal (the excessive purple flare)
2. Don't point it at bright light sources, if you don't want purple haze

Even worse, this doesn't just happen when you point it at bright light sources. Here's a picture on a rainy, overcast day with no direct sunlight - notice the light purple haze on the right side: (my 4S doesn't do this)

http://i.imgur.com/MEVqF.jpg

Welcome everyone!

This is a thread discussing the issue of excessive purple light flare on the iPhone 5. It has been determined that many cameraphones, including the iPhone 4S, share the problem of purple haze around bright light sources, especially when those bright light sources are just barely off-screen. The problem is that the iPhone 5 exhibits more light bloom with a purple tint than other phones, to the point where it is affecting image quality. Here are some comparison examples:

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/180c7n48voye9jpg/original.jpg

http://www.trbimg.com/img-506374b0/turbine/la-fi-tn-iphone-5-camera-purple-20120926-001/600

The question is: Why is it so much worse on the iPhone 5?

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Edit 2: Note - don't just point your iPhone 5 at a bright light. The bright light has to be OFF-SCREEN for the effect to happen (the majority of the time, anyway). And it needs to be fairly bright - the sun, a lamp, etc. This is a fairly specific issue with results that you can easily replicate if your iPhone 5 has this issue. And please report your status/results. Thank you!

Edit: It seems like a lot of iPhone 5's have this problem. For those just coming in, please do the following:

1. Aim your iPhone 5 camera towards a bright light source (CFL, incandescent, sun)
2. Move the camera so the light source is off-screen (especially on the shorter sides of the screen)
3. See if you experience a purple halo - either flare or haze (see sample pictures below)

Please report in if you have this issue (or if you don't, we'd like to know that too!) on your iPhone 5.

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I am having an issue with my iPhone 5's camera, where I get purple flare/haze when a bright light source (such as a lamp or the sun) is just off-camera. In addition, the 5's screen displays purple colors more brightly than a computer screens, so it looks even more prominent on the phone itself. Here is a crop & enhance of the problem: (a window with daylight coming in is just off-camera)

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/sVGVkz99

Purple flare off a work lamp: (right corner)

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/z1SxJac8

Purple haze off the sun:

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/C4HD6OxG

Purple sun flare:

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/RrcVXaSN

Slight purple haze off a tree:

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/57j8b6px

I have confirmed this issue on five iPhone 5's so far, including both the black & white model.

Testing procedure:
1. Aim your iPhone 5 camera at a bright light source
2. Move the camera so that the light source is just off-screen
3. See if the purple flare happens

It seems to happen the most off bright lamps and the sun. Not as bad on LED lighting or florescent lighting. I do get mild purple haze off my LCD computer monitors (2 tested). I take a lot of of photos and video with my iPhone and this is a really annoying problem for me. I haven't seen much on the web reported about it, but I've confirmed the issue on multiple phones, so I know it's not just me. I'm guessing it's related to the new Sapphire Crystal change from glass, but perhaps it's software-related to related to making the iPhone 4S's camera lens thinner.

Please post your results if you have an iPhone 5 (definitely doesn't happen on my 4S) after testing indoors & outdoors, thanks!

 

Also, as long as I'm complaining Here's some more problems I'm having with the 5's camera:

1. They changed the noise from speckles to smearing. I really don't care for this. I can hide the speckled noise with a film grain app, or with a de-noising app, but the smearing just looks messed up. I think it makes the overall picture look a bit better, but if you crop ("zoom") the picture to get a certain section for your photo, it becomes really apparent. Bleh.

2. Exposure blows out waaaaay too easily. Taking a picture of someone next to a bright window, for example, either results in them being extremely dark and the background with the correct colors, or a completely blow-out, all-white window with the person in semi-good color exposure. If I'm outdoors and don't nail the focus on the person, their colors get totally messed up. The 4S takes the same shot far better and does the colors correctly, even if the exposure isn't perfect. This is definitely a step down in the camera department.

3. Focus is faster in most cases, but I have some issues with it. First off all, it seems to have a lot of trouble locking onto to subjects. Second, half the time it will re-focus after I've set the focus, and my subject will be out of focus in the split-second it takes me to press the camera button to take the picture. Not a huge deal since you can lock AE/AF on the stock camera app by holding it for a few seconds, but I liked how the 4S did focus a lot better (I have a 1-year-old who does NOT stay still lol). Plus I'm forced to wait for my camera apps to update (i.e. Camera+) so that I can just move the focus box around without having to wait a few seconds for a manual lock. Here's a sample shot, where I focused on the berries, but it switched focus to the leaves in the time it took to move my finger from the focus box to the camera button:

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/1IOw3yeT

4. The viewfinder shows a crop of your final image. You are only seeing part of the image you will capture because the phone is widescreen and the final image is not that wide (black bars on the sides in preview). This is annoying because you will frame an image perfectly, take it, and then have to crop it to get that same image back - there are more pixels being captured on the top & bottom of the image than you see on the screen. I'm hoping Camera+ and the other apps will show you a 1:1 preview instead of a zoomed/cropped preview.

5. The iPhone 5's screen is over-saturated. In addition to the prominent purple color, I have to super over-saturate my photos in editing apps to get them to appear normal on a computer screen. They are nowhere near as vivid on a computer monitor as they are on the iPhone screen, even with the brightness turned down. On the 4S, I had a pretty good idea of what the image would look like, but on the 5, it is just not that accurate.

6. More of a hardware complaint really - the onboard storage is just as slow as the 4S. So now I can edit pictures really fast (Camera+ & PhotoFX are wicked fast now!), but saving edited images still takes forever. I'm guessing this is probably why they didn't go to a 12-megapixel camera...it would have taken forever to save pictures lol. I'm sure we'll see a dual-channel upgrade or something in the 5S or whatever.

7. I get a lot more blurry pictures now. It's better in low-light, but it seems more prone to movement/hand-shake. May be related to the focus issue. Here's a sample shot, hand-held, with it in "focus":

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/xy7tFlhi

I am pondering the idea of going back to the 4S. I take a lot of photos and also shoot a lot of video on my iPhone - I use it for my hobby photography, for my family photographer, and as my work camera. Really my biggest complaint is the purple flare, which is somewhat avoidable if I adjust the angle of the camera. I considered returning the 5, but since I've confirmed these issues with other iPhone 5's, that seems kind of pointless unless I just want to downgrade to the 4S.

 

Not that it probably matters, but have tested on both AT&T and Verizon iPhone 5 models. Same purple flare.

 

Seeing more of this problem at work. So far everyone's iPhone 5's have the same issue when we compare side-by-side, and the three 4S's we tried do not have this issue at the same light source.

 

Video of the purple flare in action:

http://telly.com/D0XOM

 

That's what I'm thinking - sapphire comes in pretty much all colors but red and pink/orange. I'm assuming they use synthetic sapphire, based on this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire#Transparent_and_tough

I don't think that it's a software issue. I'm hoping it is, though - I'm hoping that it can be fixed with a future patch - but if not, I want to return my iPhone 5 now and not be stuck with it. I average 2,000 shots a month on my iPhone (iPhone photography is one of my main hobbies), so the camera is a really big deal to me. I do like the additional sharpness and low-light capabilities of the 5, but if this is a general design bug on the 5 line, I don't want to be stuck with it until the new revision comes out.

 

Confirmed with Apple over the phone, this is a widespread issue. They are researching the root cause. I'll know more next week, hopefully. Edit: To clarify for all those blogs mis-quoting this post - Apple said that they had a lot of calls & complaints in about the purple issue, i.e. widespread as in a lot of people are having it. Apple did not say the words "widespread". Their media outlet did not say widespread. To date, they've said nothing public about it. However, we have had users from NYC to London to Australia report in about having this issue. I'm surprised this is one of the only forums that's reporting it since it seems to be such a common issue. Also, Syringer is awesome :awe:

Also tested some more iPhones at work. Same problem on all, purple flare/haze.

 

Yeah I'm hoping they can produce a software-based fix for it. I had a weekend film project scheduled this past weekend for the 5, but had to cancel due to the light bloom issue. Otherwise I'll just have to deal with it, or go back to the 4S. Bummer.

 

Yeah, I have a feeling this is going to be Antennagate all over again. Apple press release: "This is just what cameras do. All cameras have this." No...I've taken 20,000+ photos on my 4S, never ONCE had this problem. Here's a couple more shots from tonight, with light sources above the objects:

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/VzCHImH5

https://twitter.com/i/#!/weaksauce12/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com/IQcoQmMc

The lighting was awesome for the car shots, but I had to scrap the pics because they are all purple. Both my buddy's 5 and his wife's 5 have the exact same issue too, tested them out side-by-side with a 4S as well. Sigh.

 

I can't find much online either. But then I don't know too many people who take 100-200 shots a day on their iPhone lol. I may be in the minority

 

Yup, LED lights & regular fluorescents seem less prone to it. CFL's, regular bulbs, and the sun are far more suspect.

As far as the focus goes, I just do the focus trick now - you hold your finger on the object you want to focus on for a few seconds and the box grows bigger and blinks, and then it will say "AF/AE Lock" in small white text at the bottom off the screen and it locks the focus & exposure. So that fixes the issue - the problem is that it takes a few seconds longer than just tap-to-focus, so if you have a moving target or whatever, you can lose the shot (I have a speedy 1-year-old and he's usually out of camera range by the time I lock focus haha).

Anyway, I don't know what is causing the issue with the purple glare. From the information Apple has given us, they made 3 changes:

1. Took the 4S's camera and made it thinner
2. Changed the camera glass to Sapphire Crystal
3. Changed how the camera operates in software due to the new CPU (enhanced color, focus, etc.)

So it seems like there are 3 possible culprits:

1. Making the camera thinner changed the optics and causes the issue
2. The Sapphire Crystal is causing the issue (seems most likely to me, due to the color issue)
3. The software/CPU processing is not balancing things right and is causing the color imbalance

Software problems seems the least likely to me, because it's a haze effect, which seems optical (hardware) to me. Even if the color was changed to white or yellow or whatever through a color balance shift in software, the haze would still exist. We did some testing at work yesterday between a 4S and a couple 5's and didn't experience the same issues at all with the 4S.

I hate to get so fixated on one particular issue, particularly because I'm starting to feel like I'm whining about it, but the camera is a big deal to me. I do most of the photography at my work for it (group events, meetings, parts, machine tools, etc.) as well as my family photography and hobby photography. The camera was pretty much the sole reason I moved from the 4S to the 5. And it wouldn't be such a big deal if it was just my phone, but every single iPhone 5 that I have physically laid my hands on over the past 4 days has the exact same issue, so I know it's not just mine. Hopefully just a bad batch, but time will tell.

 

Hey, welcome aboard! :thumbsup:

Yeah, when I called in, they looked into their complaint database and said there were a ton of calls in about it (but I was on the phone with them a long time, 30 minutes+, and talked to multiple people). So it's not a limited issue. Every single iPhone 5 I've laid my hands on over the past 4 days has had the issue. I'm really hoping that the first batch is just defective and has some quality-control issues (I've seen 3 phones with the "scuffgate" issue - my black one and my friend's 2 white ones) and that we can swap them out with better ones as they come in. I do like the sharpness and low-light better on the 5, so I'd hate to downgrade.

 

Thanks - yeah it's really weird, I've seen ZERO coverage of it ANYWHERE, despite people doing camera testing and whatnot. But when you follow the procedure (bright light off-camera), pretty much everyone has it. I'm up to 10 or so iPhone 5's tested, they all look the same. Le sigh

 

Just going to throw this in for people doing Google searches on the issue: (since there's not much info available)

iPhone 5 defective camera
iPhone 5 glare
iPhone 5 haze
iPhone 5 purple
iPhone 5 magenta
iPhone 5 bad camera
iPhone 5 camera problems
iPhone 5 weird camera

Also light leaks are now being reported:

http://www.bgr.com/2012/09/24/iphone-5-light-leak-apple-defect/

Also people are now receiving iPhones that are scuffed & scratched right out of the box:

http://www.bgr.com/2012/09/24/iphone-5-scratching-scuffs/