I don’t care how little noise, or how much dynamic range a camera has, if you can’t reliably get sharp images out of it it’s no good anyway. In this case, I’m referring motion blur due to camera shake, the same problem I complained about when I first got my iPhone 4.

In my opinion there were two major faults with the camera software in IOS4.

1. It allowed the shutter speed to drop below what would be needed to hand hold the camera without motion blur (1/30th)
2. It favored dropping the shutter speed below 1/30th instead of raising the ISO when possible (i.e. I’d get shots at 1/15th ISO 125 instead of 1/30th ISO 250).

Well iOS 5 doesn’t do squat for either of those issues. It still drops the shutter speed to 1/15th, all the damn time even when there enough light to be at ISO 125. Moreover, there’s no indication that the camera is doing that, or that your images might be blurry until you take the shot and go back and look at it.

So what did Apple do to make the camera better?

They gave us a rule of thirds grid and the ability to use the volume up button as a shutter release. Incidentally, in the little bit of playing around I’ve done, using the volume up button as the shutter release makes things worse.

Sigh.

Maybe Apple will really throw us photographers a bone and do something about this in iOS 6.