After both my wife and I upgraded our iPhones, I found myself with a 3G, 3Gs and 4 at my disposal. Which has the best camera? Obviously the newest one – the 4 – but it’s no fun to simply take my word for it. So, for a few days I carried around all 3 phones and took roughly identical photos with each one.
None of these photos are processed, and in almost all cases the camera was in full automatic mode – I didn’t tap to focus or change exposure. In the comparison photos below, I shrank the 3Gs and 4 shots to match the 3G so that everything was the same relative size. You want full size? Go to this gallery to see them in all their glory. Most shots are from Santa Monica near the pier or on the UCLA campus.
Who Cares?
I do. Of course this experiment has no practical purpose, but it’s interesting to see how dramatic the differences are. I expect that we will continue to see improvements in phone cameras and see dedicated compact cameras lose a big chunk of the market.
Personally, I’ve used the iPhone extensively in my One/Day Project because I always have it with me – beats carrying a DSLR around all the time. Even before I had one myself, I used my wife’s 3G to keep up with my daily photos on two long trips we took last year – Maine and West Coast. Assuming I’ll stick with iPhones in the future, I care deeply about the quality of the camera since I use it so often.
Specs
The following table is what I came up with myself by direct observation. Explanations below. Why didnt I compare the the original iPhone, too? Well, you see, I don’t have one. Sorry.
| Model | 3G | 3Gs | 4 |
| Megapixels | 1.92 | 3.15 | 5.02 |
| Photo Dimensions | 1600×1200 | 2048×1536 | 2592×1936 |
| Aspect Ratio | 4:3 | 4:3 | 4:2.99 |
| Tap to Focus? | no | yes | yes |
| Macro (est.) | 16″ | 41 cm | 3″ | 7.5 cm | 3″ | 7.5 cm |
| Aperture | f/2.8 | f/2.8 | f/2.8 |
| Shutter Speed (s) | ? | 1/10 – 1/28000 | 1/15 – 1/30000 |
| ISO | ? | 64 – 1016 | 80 – 1000 |
| Angle | wide | wider | widest! |
| EXIF Model | iPhone 3G | iPhone 3Gs | iPhone |
Dimensions, aperture and EXIF model are all things I read from an image file’s EXIF metadata – the values I listed never change. Macro refers to the closest focusing distance, which I got by putting the lens near the beginning of a ruler and seeing where the numbers came into focus. There are ways of calculating the angle of view, but that’s beyond my pay grade.
That leaves us with the two variable specs – they can change with every shot. Since aperture is fixed, I was able to get the highest shutter speed and lowest ISO by pointing the cameras at the sun (not recommended!) and likewise the slowest shutter and highest ISO by taking shots in a dark closet. What’s interesting is that the 4 appears to have just 12 ISO settings (80, 100, 125, 160, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, 1000) while the 3Gs included every value in between. Out of the 886 3Gs photos I have in front of me, there are 179 different ISO speeds. The situation is similar with shutter speeds.
Another interesting thing about ISO and shutter speeds is that the iPhone 4 will put you on the lowest shutter speed possible (1/15 seconds) before boosting the ISO. The iPhone 3Gs is more flexible, boosting the ISO starting at 1/120 seconds. The iPhone gives you no indication of this, so you’re only recourse is to check the photo and see if it’s blurry. But, since camera phones tend to be noisy at even the lowest ISOs, I’m OK with the iPhone 4′s strategy.
Finally, why isn’t the aspect ratio of iPhone 4 photos ever so slightly different from 4:3? That really bugged me when I was resizing the photos.
Why the question marks for the 3G?
Pretty much every digital camera writes metadata to the image file – things such as date/time, camera model, ISO, shutter speed, aperture and whether or not the flash fired. For some reason, the 3G does not include the shutter speed or ISO, so I have no way of knowing what the values are. It’s a pretty good bet that they’re similar or identical to the 3Gs, though.
Observations
The iPhone 4 has a wider-angle lens
The 3Gs has a slightly wider angle than the 3G, but the difference is slight. It’s much more noticeable with the 4. Some people use the wide angle to “get it all in,” but you can get much more creative shots by getting close to your subject and still show the background. It’s not the most exciting subject, but following comparison makes the difference pretty obvious – all 3 shots were taken from the same distance.
Bulletin Board at UCLA
The iPhone 3G captures color… interestingly
Most photos have a grungy magenta/green-ish tone. The 3Gs and 4 are much more neutral. The auto white balance usually does a good job, but it would be nice to have the option to adjust it manually. Note the lack of blue in the sky in the following comparison. The difference is obvious in some of the other comparisons also.
Trees at UCLA's botanical gardens
Exposure wildly different – sometimes
When you tap on a section of the screen on the 3Gs or 4, the camera focuses and adjusts the exposure for whatever you tapped on, including white balance. The following comparison shows why you need tap-to-focus: sometimes the auto-exposure fails miserably. Blame it on the overcast sky? I’ve included the histograms from Lightroom to show how under exposed the 3Gs and 3G photos are.
Santa Monica Pier looking South
Maxed out ISO not as painful
The following shots were taken in a dark bathroom and then I hit the “auto” button in Lightroom to exaggerate the noise. There’s a pretty obvious improvement from 3G to 3Gs to 4.
Hand Towel in a Dark Bathroom
Panoramas are cool
Using Pano (well worth the $2.99), I made roughly the same panorama on all 3 phones. The high-res screen of the iPhone 4 really helps line up the images – it’s hard to see on the 3G and 3Gs and sometimes you mis-align consecutive images, resulting in weird angles or ghosting. I can’t pick out any interesting differences between the three, although it should be noted that the resolutions are very different.
| Model | Width (px) | Height (px) | File Size |
| 4 | 5601 | 1249 | 1.86 MB |
| 3Gs | 4921 | 982 | 1.14 MB |
| 3G | 3830 | 761 | 668 KB |
Santa Monica's Palisades Park
Digital zoom is passable on the 4
iOS 4 brought digital zoom to all models. It sucks, of course, like all digital zooms. If you’re subject is too small, you should get closer. But, getting closer is not always possible, and many non-photographers might not know how to crop and edit photos, so in those cases you might as well use it. As expected, the iPhone 4 far outperformed the others – you can still make out details on the lifeguard tower. The 3G is more of a blur that you might not be able to identify if you didn’t already know what you were looking at.
Houses along Pacific Coast Highway
[Sorry for the weird line in this photo... it's not supposed to be there. I'd fix it, but don't feel like going through the work]
3Gs leans towards the dark side
This comparison really captures the dark tendency of 3Gs photos. You can always tap to focus and change the exposure, but you shouldn’t have to do that. This higher-contrast look isn’t always bad, though, check out the bamboo comparison below to see why.
Powell Library Reading Room, UCLA
Macro ability is decent on newer models
The lack of macro on the 3G is quite regrettable. When I did the comparison below I did NOT tap to focus – the phone automatically focused on the “W” in the first two shots. The fixed focus of the 3G is painfully obvious here.
Ergonomic Keyboard
Relative size comparison
Here’s a comparison showing the relative size of the 3 models.
Royce Hall at UCLA
Some more comparisons!
Lights at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
Varying moods of Juan
Road to the Santa Monica Pier
Bamboo
Morning Shadows
If for some reason you haven’t had enough, there are many more trios of photos in this gallery!
Conclusions
The iPhone 4′s camera is a huge step forward in quality. Apart from the obvious things like higher-resolution, it has better high-ISO performance and consistently creates well-exposed photographs with proper color balance. The Retina Display makes it far easier to compose shots compared to the older models. The wider angle combined with a decent macro focus distance allow for more creativity, in my opinion. Even digital zoom was surprisingly decent on the 4. Overall I’m very happy with the improvements over the previous models, especially over the 3G.
BUT AFTER ALL THIS…
My 5 year-old compact Canon SD400 takes better quality photos and has many more features. Cheers 
Thanks Jonathan for an excellent and practical test. Just what I needed. On the one hand it is surprising how good some of the shots with even the 3GS are. On the other hand my four-year-old Pentax pocket camera (like your old Canon) gives even better results, by a very big margin. So the only asset these cameraphones really have is convenience.
Thank you for this! iPhone 5 is rumored to have 1080p recording and 8mp. At this rate casual photographers can well use a phone to do the job. That is if the sensor is actually capable.
I’ve done a comparison of the 3G and 3GS myself. The difference is very small until focus comes into play. Pictures from close by are considerably better on the 3GS/4. Something to consider for people looking for old ebay phones.
iPhone 3G vs 3GS camera comparison
Cool, thanks Robin. I sure hope that the quality only continues to increase, although I appreciate the simpleness of the iPhone’s camera. I like that they focus on things like a backlit sensor, rather than a high megapixel count.
And yes, the ability to focus up close was a huge omission on the 3G camera. It also did terrible in low light, though, and I was not impressed with the low-resolution. The 3Gs improved greatly on those last two.