Ipad 2 camera grainy

Just bought my dad an iPad2 for fathers day, took him to the store acting like I was getting one so he would try it out and then surprise him. He liked everything about it, and even though the pics weren't as good as my iPhone4 he was still pretty impressed with the quality.

When he got home on Monday he tried everything out (including the camera). He called me right away saying how the pictures were grainy, so I went by to check it out. It looks just like your picture, even before he snapped the pic. The front camera actually looked a little better. I figured something had to be wrong.

He just went to the apple store today and told them about it. They told him it was only a 1mp camera (my fault for not checking on that). I assumed since it took HD vid like the iPhone it had the same camera. The tech said that the iPad was not thick enough at the edges to fit the iPhone's camera. The one thing he did say is that it's all about the lighting, and that's why the camera works so good in the store.

Kind of a bummer he can't really take pictures indoors for the most part, but that wasn't the main reason he wanted it anyway.

Yes. What bevhoward said.

Resolution is not the issue, its the graininess.

And to all those who say caveat emptor, or "Use a digital camera instead", or "return your iPad 2"... You are not actually helping. You are entirely missing the point the OP and the rest of us are making.

It is myopic to suggest we take pictures with another device; it presumes that we all want to use our iPad camera to just snap a picture for posterity when, in fact, the iPad camera can do so much more.

For example, today I wanted to take some photos to upload to eBay. I purposefully chose my iPad for the task so I could get a few pictures of the item, including the specs on the packaging. My plan was to then use my editing app on the iPad to crop, annotate, and redact serial numbers from the photos, then use the eBay app to easily upload them and list my item. Easy peasy, right? Wrong.

I don't have an iphone or a digital camera and, having erroneously assumed that the camera could take a clear picture in good light, I set about my task. I had to turn all the lights in the house on just to see the words on the packaging, yet I still could not read them. So the pictures were useless. Not because the resolution was too low. Not because the picture was too blurry. But because the picture was too grainy... as if I had taken the photos in the dark.

I searched everywhere for camera settings that could fix the problem but found none. That is what we are asking for... Someone with more knowledge than us to educate us on how to overcome the graininess issue and take the best picture possible with the camera we have. We all already know that we can use another camera (which I ended up doing by the way)... What we want to know is how to maximize the camera we already have.

Does anyone have a solution, such as a setting we are missing... Or another camera app... That will minimize or eliminate the graininess in the iPad camera? If so, please share.

For my task, I ended up using my blackberry camera to take awesome images, but I had to then email them to myself, head over to my computer, open photoshop to crop the pics... The open them again in Acrobat to annotate and redact them, resave them, and then upload them to eBay. Obviously I could have done this in the first place but it should have been easier from my iPad.

I can envision other scenarios where iPad applications would be stymied by the graininess of the images taken with the iPads camera. From the ads, it seemed I could use the iPad 2 camera with scannerpro, an app that takes pictures of documents for, inter alia, faxing, OCR, document archiving on the go. As an attorney, this would be highly useful, but not if the picture is so grainy that I can't recognize the words. And if my eyes can't make out the words, how then can an optical character recognition app!?!?

Because it seems so unlikely that apps like ScannerPro, or even the stock Camera app would be made available to the iPad 2 if the graininess we are seeing is normal, this thread (and dozens like it) are asking the obvious question: how do we deal with the iPad 2 camera's grainy images? I wish I could upload a pic to this thread to show everyone... They are not just bad... They are terrible to the point of being useless. I have pictures from cheap 1970's 35mm cameras that are clearer. Resolution is not the issue...

...and lighting isn't the solution. Not for me, at least, since one by one I turned all the lights on in the house and placed the object directly under the brightest light I had and still the image was too grainy to make out.

So again, if anyone has a workaround, or knows whether it is a problem with just some cameras, please chime in. Even if you have reason to believe that the iPad 2 rear camera is supposed to be grainy to the extreme, then we need to know that too, in order to not waste time like I did today; or worse, spend money on iOS camera apps that have no business being sold to anyone other than iPhone users.

If you'd read the entire thread and all the others just like it, you'd have read that the camera on the iPad is designed for FaceTime. That's all. it's not a great camera. There's nothing you or I can do to change that.better light helps but it still isn't a grat camera. There are no workarounds and it's performing to spec. If you want great pictures, yes, you'll have to use a different device. Will Apple include a better camera in the next iPad? No one here knows.

Submit your feedback to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Thank you Meg. Snotty though your answer was, at least it was absolute. Now I can put the issue to bed once and for all... And I thank you for that.

You could not have known, but I spent over 5 hours this afternoon reading threads, *including the entirety of this one*... I still wasn't able to discern whether this was normal behavior for the iPad 2 camera (for example one thread here explained that one man's iPad 2 took a grainy shot while his girlfriend's iPad 2 took the same shot and it looked great). Confusing, is it not?

In addition, I also searched exhaustively for an app that would compensate for the graininess. Considering the ingenuity behind some amazing apps that developers have created, I thought it well within the realm of possibility that one existed to fixed this fundamental problem.

It is ambiguities like these that result in the majority of threads on this topic as "unsolved", including this thread.

If I knew how, I would mark your answer as the "correct" one... despite it's highly presumptive, condescending tone (although I am sure you didn't mean to come off that way).

Only the originalnposter can mark an answer as helpful and I'm sure they've long since moved on.

It has been an interesting thread.

I am reluctant to mark the thread answered since the primary question I was seeking an answer for never got addressed...

...specifically, why does the "viewfinder" display the onscreen image at a much higher quality than the captured image?

Unfortunately, I only had access to the Ipad2 for a few hours helping a client purchase it (and the camera viewfinder display at the store was part of my "help" for her decision between a 1 and 2) and then set it up.

Still here....

Beverly Howard

Unless you are really Goriley123 then you aren't the original poster. ;-)

>> OP <<

oops... guess I confused an original problem with an original post ;-)

Good catch, but, not soon enough... can't edit or erase my botch.

Beverly Howard

Nevertheless, the more I've thought about this, the more strange the whole thing sounds.

Apple added a back and front camera just for FaceTime, which not many people use at all... that must have been quite expensive... adding two cameras to a small device for simply one application. Especially, considering most people still use Skype or Google's service.

Weirder yet, if I am understanding correctly... the cameras are crap. Not only that, but it seems everyone knows they are crap but they don't care (except a few of us, apparently).

Bear with me now. So if I got this right...

Apple put out a crappy product on purpose: That doesn't sound like them at all. (and make no mistake, that rear camera is definitely crappy).

On top of that, it seems that outside of a handful of us, Apple's customers don't even care: That *definitely* doesn't sound like them, either.

I am not saying I don't believe it, I am just saying that it all seems pretty bizarre to me. I thought Apple was better than that. As a decades long PC/Microsoft user, I always had this impression that Apple put out premium, gorgeous products that worked elegantly to the point of being elite. I guess I am just a little surprised that they would put crappy cameras in the iPad 2 and advertise them in a way that, lets face it, did nothing to dissuade the impression that they were better than they are (to put it mildly).

I guess some part of me still thinks those cameras are capable of taking better stills than I've seen so far. That would make more sense to me.

>> cameras are crap <<

That adjective (which has been used here several times) is a very subjective specification.

I still believe that this is a technically addressable problem but there has really been no valid technical response here, or anywhere else to date that I have been able to find.

The camera resolutions for both the iPad2 and the iTouch are 720x960, but, resolution is not the problem although it may see so for anyone used to multi megapixel cameras. I've taken many, many pictures over the last decade at lower resolutions with better results.

Using the iTouch as a comparison, consider the following 60x60 pixel crops showing the hair of the same person... the one on the left directly out of an ipad2 image, and the one on the right from an itouch... same place, same conditions.

It's clear that the image quality is different... the former was as sharp or sharper than the latter on the screen, but, put your technical specs on and observe that the stored image on the left didn't store the same as the one on the right. Identical resolution, but, within those resolutions, I believe that the storage process, not the lens, muddied the colors together, probably because of a jpeg compression setting or problem within the firmware.

This ipad2 problem really doesn't matter to me, but I think it matters to everyone that no one from apple seems to care when users take the time to post documented information about problems and let them get blown away by the wind of non technical opinion responses.

Beverly Howard

Beverly,

This is a user-to-user forum. Apple states at the outset, when you sign in and agree to the Terms of Use that this is not Apple Technical Support and Apple's participation in the forum is very, very limited.

If people are having hardware problems with their iPads, whether the camera or anything else, this is really not the place to seek help beyond a very basic level. A better. more productive, method would be to either contact Apple Technical Support (Contact Us link is at the bottom right of every page) or make an appointment at the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store. By doing that, Apple will get the information that there are X number of people having hardware problems with a given system and they will have all the relevant details that they need. It's the only way they will get enough information to identify a systemic problem (if there is one). This thread, as an example, is mostly people who's cameras are probably working just fine but who don't like the quality, which is a totally different complaint. It is highly unlikely that folks from Apple Tech Support are reading through every thread on the forum to separate out hardware problems from all the other issues. It's just not an effective use of time.

You are right, @bevhoward.

At first I thought our issues differed in that both my iPad screen AND the resultant picture were both equally as grainy. Then i read your post and remembered that I could read the text [from the image I wanted to capture] on the screen when using iPad rear camera, but I could not read it in the resulting image.

I tested this again today and I realize that our issues are not different. The iPad screen displays the image (any image) from the camera at an OK quality. Not great, but not "crappy", either. The resulting image... the one ultimately saved as a file... was drastically worse.

I even placed the ipad on a steady surface for the test to eliminate camera shake. The light before and after the shots remained constant, also taking lighting out of the equation.

So you are right when you say that something must be degrading the image during capture. As you noted, the most likely culprit is the compression algorithm used when saving the file to the device.

Since a firmware update can fix that, I have to conclude that our best option is to submit our grievance/findings to Apple via Apple's feedback program.

@Meg...

I, for one am grateful for these discussions as I now learned that my problem is also related to the image "storage process", as Bev put it, and not the camera itself.

Armed with this information, Bev, I, and future visitors to this thread are now able to supply Apple tech support with a more precise description of the issue.

As I waxed on about in last night's post, I had a gut feeling that the camera, as hardware, couldn't be the issue because it's not typical for Apple to release sub-par hardware. This makes more sense. Especially when you consider that iMovie and PhotoBooth, not just FaceTime, are also a selling points for this particular camera.

Thanks again, all.

Lou

>> This is a user-to-user forum. <<

That tears it.

The "policy" that you quote is apple's and my point is that apple doesn't care enough to even observe these forums for information about the user experience.

"Rules" that require users to depart from productive discussions in apple's own forums and expend their time at zero cost to apple in order for them to even consider viewing the facts of a user problem underscores the fact that apple doesn't care about user problems.

I know about apple's requirements to "report problems" and I have been down that road into communication purgatory several times since I began supporting my wife's voyage into iOS problem solving and I will never go there again.

The entire "reporting" process is designed to both waste copious amounts of the users time without reservation and to make the experience so unpleasant that the user will never consider using it again.

Add to that boiler plate responses weeks later that do nothing more than state that no one behind apple's "user communication wall" cares in the least.

Your post clearly states that any problems beyond basic user questions posted here are useless for anything other than providing fodder for the flamers and wasting the "communities" collective time.

The really obvious statement is that apple feels that it is not part of the apple community.

Thanks for those that understood the technical issues I posted and supported those posts.

Assuming apple allows me to continue to post here, I will continue to post problems, their technical aspects and user workarounds primarily to make the information relatively easy for other users to at least learn about them.

Sincerely,

Beverly Howard

That's a rather strange reply to a fellow user who simply pointed out that this is a user-to-user forum which is simply hosted by Apple. You can't count on anyone from Apple necessarily seeing what you post here.

If you want your observation/suggestion to get directly to Apple use this link: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

There is nothing unpleasant about using that channel.