Will the iPhone 3GS Kill the Cheap Pocket Camera?

One of the biggest surprises in the week or so since the the iPhone 3GS shipped is the camera. It is far better than anyone was expecting, far better than a 50% increase in pixel-count would suggest. A look around the internet turns up some rather nice photos, and some rather enthusiastic testimonies.

“With focus control like this, it’s hard to believe it’s just a cameraphone. Tap-to-focus is how all cameras ought to work from now on,” says Dave Shea, aka Mezzoblue, who took the photo above.

That focus control is one of the reasons the camera has improved so much. Autofocus lenses don’t have to be sharp front to back. This means that there is less of a compromise between flexibility and quality, and the lens can be designed to be sharper. And any focusing, auto or manual, means that you can achieve a shallower depth of field for differential focus and blurred backgrounds. That the iPhone also has touch-to-focus control is just gravy.

But this isn’t the real reason that the iPhone poses a threat to the standalone point’n’shoot camera. The 3GS is “just good enough” for most people to take good everyday pictures. And remember the much repeated saying that the best camera is the one you have with you. Combine these, and even the experienced shooter might think twice about buying a compact to supplement their DSLR. Again, for most shots, the new 3GS will be good enough.

Now it has a decent camera, the iPhone solves another problem for many users. Sharing. You or I might be photo junkies, happy to spend hours tweaking our pictures to upload and share, but most people take the snaps and that’s it. My mother stopped using her new digicam because the memory card is full. With the iPhone, though, sharing is easy — you can do it direct from the phone, right now, wherever you are. This alone could be the killer app for many people. Nobody prints photos anymore, and few upload anything. With the Polaroid dead, the iPhone is the instant camera to replace it. In fact, maybe Apple should add a shake-to-upload feature?

And one more thing. Video. This was the other thing the first two iPhones lacked, and a good reason for buying a compact camera. But with a compact camera, video is even harder to share than photos. Not so with the iPhone. “Capturing, trimming, and sharing video with the new iPhone 3G S is literally a snap,” says Derrick Story” on his photography blog, “After a bit of testing, the easiest way to share is directly from the device itself.”

Story is an experienced photographer and video podcaster, and even he says that it’s easier to upload video from the iPhone than from a computer.

There are of course many things the iPhone camera doesn’t do. It doesn’t have a flash (although low-light pictures and video look surprisingly good), it has no optical zoom and it doesn’t have a dozen auto modes. But that is missing the point, and the point is that the 3GS camera is deliberately limited, but what it does do, it does well enough to make you leave your camera at home.