Digital Photography Review sheds light on the iPhone 5 purple haze issue

The Apple iPhone 5 launch hasn’t been the smoothest of rides. The phone has faced criticism for various reasons, including build quality, battery life and, most recently, camera performance.

In case you’ve missed it, we are talking about was the purple haze seen in some of the iPhone 5 camera photos with a bright light source just entering the frame. In their review of the iPhone 5 camera, Digital Photography Review talked about this phenomenon, what could be causing it and how big a deal it really is.

One of the purported reasons for this issue was the presence of sapphire crystal as lens cover on the iPhone 5, which people believed would give the images that purple tint. DP Review believes that is not the case and indeed, when you compare it to the iPhone 4S images in their review you will see the same effect, even though the 4S has a simpler glass lens cover.

DP Review also dismissed blooming, chromatic aberrations and IR sensitivity as possible reasons, as the actual results don’t match the kind of results you’d get if either of these issues were at play. Eventually they zeroed in internal reflections and/or lens flare to be the possible culprit.

So what’s their solution to this problem? Well, as any photographer or camera manual would tell you, don’t point the camera at a bright light while taking a picture and you should be fine. With a bright light source in a corner, your photos would be pretty much ruined anyway, with or without the haze. Also, lens flare is pretty common problem with cameras and not something exclusive to the iPhone. In other words, it’s no big deal.

You can read more about the test and the rest of the review in the link below.

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