Camera settings

neuroanatomist wrote:
Yes, you're missing something. You're missing an actual digital camera, which the iPhone is not.

Thanks for the reply and the feedback link but I must disagree with you. It has a lens, a cmos sensor, a shutter, a camera roll. It most definitely is an actual digital camera. The phone I just replaced, an old Sony-Ericsson had scene modes, panorama, exposure adjustment. It took beautiful photographs at night. These are the sort of things that have become the norm for very basic cameras these days as they are software items that are cheap and easy to implement. Hardware items like flash and optical zoom are more expensive to make and are rare in camera phones so far. I knew that the iPhone has a particularly basic camera, but having no controls whatsoever is surprising. It is annoying to now have to put a 2nd camera in a pocket when I go out.

The iPhone camera reminds me of my first ever camera when I was a kid in 1963 - a Kodak Brownie Starlet. OOps, no I am wrong, the Starlet had a setting button for color and black and white which gave it one more control than the iPhone camera has! And it could use flash!

Here there are shortages of the iPhone and the way it works is you sign up for the plan and then get the phone delivered (seems to be 1 to 3 weeks to get it) Trying it out first is not always an option.

Besides email and apps had to over ride knowledge of a poor camera

I do believe the other North American smartphone - the Blackberry also has a poor camera, but in the rest of the world we are used to 3G smartphones from European and Asian manufacturers and the cameras on those are superb, but even the cameras on their cheap dumb phones tend to have more features than the iPhone.