iPhone 5s Camera Features: Slo-Mo video, Burst mode and more [Video Walkthrough]

BY Gautam Prabhu

Published 22 Sep 2013

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Apple’s iPhone 5s, the 7th generation of the iPhone, may look exactly like the iPhone but comes packed with new features such as the faster, and more powerful 64-bit A7 chip, vastly improved iSight Camera and Touch ID sensor.

We’ve already gone through iPhone 5s’ cool Touch ID sensor in great detail, so in this video we take a closer look at iPhone 5s camera’s new features.

Slo-Mo Video

iPhone 5s camera sports a new slow-motion video feature. It can shoot 720p videos at a high frame rate of 120 fps (regular frame rate is 30 fps), which means the video can be slowed down to quarter of the speed and still appear normal to the human eye.

Here’s how it works:

To shoot a slo-mo video, swipe from left to right on the shutter button to switch the mode to Slo-Mo video. It’s the last option, and just after Video.

Then tap on the shutter button to start taking the video and tap on it again to finish recording. You then have to select the portion that you want to play in slow-motion. So tap on the thumbnail in the bottom left corner, and use the vertical bars beneath the frame viewer to set the section you want to play back in slow motion. You can play the entire video in slow motion.

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Improved Low-light Performance with True-Tone flash:

iPhone 5s comes with new LED flash called “True Tone flash.” It’s made of two LEDs, one the cooler white one and the other is warmer amber one. In real-time the Camera app uses software algorithms to analyze the scene, and adjusts the flash intensity and color temperature using over 1000 unique variations, to light up your subject appropriately.

Apple says that this allows the iPhone 5s to take photos with more natural-looking skin tones, not too cool or not too warm. If you’ve ever used a camera flash on a phone before, you know that the resulting images are not very bad quality. Here’s an image from Apple’s site illustrating the difference:

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Our tests also show that the low-light capabilities of iPhone 5s is much better compared to the iPhone 5, the photos are a lot sharper as you can see in the side-by-side comparison below. The photos taken using iPhone 5s are a lot sharper.

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Burst Mode:

iPhone 5s also comes with a new Burst mode, which lets you take up to 10 shots per second so that you don’t miss a moment. The Camera app analyse these photos in real-time, and selects individual photos or a scene of photos based on sharpness and clarity, and even detects when someone’s eyes are closed.

This is possible thanks to Apple’s new A7 chip that comes with an all-new image signal processor on-board, which delivers faster photo capture and up to 2x faster autofocus.

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Here’s how it works:

  • Touch and hold the shutter button to take photos in burst mode. Lift your finger to release the shutter button, and stop taking photos.
  • A counter will tell you how many photos you’ve taken, until you lift your finger.
  • To see the suggested photos and select the photos you want to keep, tap on the thumbnail in the bottom left corner, and then tap on “Favorites.” You will notice grey dots for some of the thumbnails, those are the suggested photos.
  • To copy a photo from the burst as a separate photo in Camera Roll, tap the circle on the lower-right corner of the photo, it will turn green, which indicates that the photos has been selected. The selected photos will now appear in your in your Camera Roll as individual photos.
  • To delete the burst of photos, tap it, then tap the “Delete” icon in the lower right corner. Please not that the photos you had selected as favorites won’t be deleted, they will be added to the Camera roll.

Here’s a video walkthrough of the iPhone 5s’ camera features, which should give a much better idea of how it works.

The new camera features is easily one of my favorite features of the iPhone 5s, after the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

Let me know what you think in the comments section below.