The beauty of having a camera on your Apple iPhone is twofold: you can capture candid moments wherever you are and it’s likely that picture quality will be pretty good considering the camera on the Apple smartphone is one of the best you’ll find on any handset. However, sometimes we miss some of the better moments or our pictures turn out to be blurry because the camera’s autofocus just wasn’t fast enough. Apple may be setting out to fix that.
The first issue with the iPhone camera was that the shutter was relatively slow and there was just a bit of lag between the time you pressed the button and when the picture was actually taken. With iOS 4, the option of zooming was added and the shutter speed was much faster, so pictures turned out to be less blurry. However, the autofocus feature has still remained a bit slow.
According to Patently Apple, future iPhone models or software might make the autofocus much faster than it is now:
In order to take sharper pictures of a scene, a digital camera may be equipped with a moveable lens system that is controlled by an automatic lens focusing system or autofocus system. When the user has pressed the camera’s shutter button part way, the autofocus system responds by quickly calculating the correct lens position that results in a subject in the scene being in focus, before the user has pressed the shutter button all the way (at which point a final picture of the scene is taken or accepted and then stored in the camera). Obtaining the correct focus quickly is important in digital cameras running on battery power because time and power usage should be minimized to the extent possible. The autofocus system should also work in a continuous image capture mode where the camera takes a rapid sequence of still pictures (e.g., video). For instance, in a video mode the focus is automatically adjusted in real-time as the scene changes.
The rest of the patent might get a bit technical for the average person, but the info is exciting. It seems as though Apple won’t just be speeding up autofocus, but improving it for video capture modes, too.
If you’d like to see a full dissection of the patent, click on the link below.
[Via: Patently Apple]