It was with great excitement that I upgraded my Iphone 3g to an Iphone 4. Even thought there may have been some phone problems, I was mainly excited about being able to shoot and edit HD video on my phone. always having a good camera was also a plus, especially now that there was a flash.
But after shooting just a small amount of video, my smile started to lessen. It seemed no matter how still I head the camera, the video came out jerky and seemed a little wishy washy. But it wasn’t until I did some editing on a bigger computer and could see what was happening frame by frame that I was able to understand the depth of the problem.
My Iphone 4 was distorting and warping images in some sort of unadvertised effort at EIS, or electronic image stabilization.
Take a look at the following frames. See how the potato is elongated and blurred in the second picture, and then shortened in the next one?
I noticed this in all the videos I had shot up to this point. So like any good Apple nut I sent the pics to Steve Jobs. Two days later I got a call back from Heather A. at corporate communications and she asked for the original video file because the engineers wanted to see what was going on. Cool, someone from Apple actually read my email.
After quite a few phone calls, the engineers said, there was nothing they could do, and there was no software fix. The distortion was here to stay due to the cmos chip they were using.
Rats! The main reason I upgraded was so I could avoid getting Flip camera and always have a video camera with me. The pone part was good and I enjoyed the speed bump over my Iphone 3g but was it worth another 2 years with AT&T? Eventually I decided no and returned it. My 3g is just fine and I have other options for cameras and video.
Here’s hoping Verizon comes out with an Iphone 5 in January and they can fix this problem.
Here are some other videos I shot with it, you can see the watery effects of the Iphone 4 video.
Rob Barrett, stuff 