iPad 4 (Late 2012) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 6, 2012 4:40 PM ESTCamera
The iPad 4 features a 5MP rear facing iSight camera and a 1.2MP front facing FaceTime HD camera. The rear camera shoots photos at 2592 x 1936, while the front facing camera shoots photos at 1280 x 960. The aperture and focal length of the rear facing camera haven't changed compared to the 3rd generation iPad.
| Rear Facing Camera Comparison | |||||||
| Sensor | Resolution | Compressed JPEG Size | Aperture | Focal Length | |||
| Apple iPad 4 | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | 3.4MB | f/2.4 | 4.3mm | ||
| Apple iPad 3 | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | 3.1MB | f/2.4 | 4.3mm | ||
| Apple iPad 2,4 | 0.7MP | 960 x 720 | 344KB | f/2.4 | 2.0mm | ||
| Apple iPad mini | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | 3.1MB | f/2.4 | 3.3mm | ||
| Apple iPhone 5 | 8MP | 3264 x 2448 | 3.1MB | f/2.4 | 4.1mm | ||
| Apple iPod Touch 5 | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | 3.1MB | f/2.4 | 3.3mm | ||
Still image quality out of the rear camera is comparable to the 3rd generation iPad, and clearly better than the iPad mini.
The front facing camera sees the biggest improvement over the iPad 3. The difference is like night and day thanks to the increase in sensor quality and resolution.
| Front Facing Camera Comparison | |||||||
| Sensor | Resolution | Compressed JPEG Size | Aperture | Focal Length | |||
| Apple iPad 4 | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | 426KB | f/2.4 | 2.2mm | ||
| Apple iPad 3 | 0.3MP | 640 x 480 | 117KB | f/2.4 | 1.8mm | ||
| Apple iPad 2,4 | 0.3MP | 640 x 480 | 105KB | f/2.4 | 1.8mm | ||
| Apple iPad mini | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | 372KB | f/2.4 | 2.2mm | ||
| Apple iPhone 5 | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | 400KB | f/2.4 | 2.2mm | ||
| Apple iPod Touch 5 | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | 406KB | f/2.4 | 2.2mm | ||
Video
The iPad 4 shoots 1080p video from its rear camera and 720p on the front. Video shot with the rear camera is encoded using H.264 (High Profile) at an average bitrate north of 17Mbps. This puts the encode parameters similar to those of the iPhone 5 and iPad mini. The same is true for the front facing camera.
The front facing camera shoots baseline video at roughly 10.5Mbps:
Video quality is pretty good as well:
WiFi Performance
Like the iPad mini and iPhone 5, the iPad 4 uses Broadcom's BCM4334 WiFi controller. The 4334 supports dual-band 802.11n as well as fallback to 802.11b/g. On 5GHz Apple continues to support 40MHz channels for a maximum PHY rate of 150Mbps. Performance and reception both remain solid:
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Zink - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link
HP Touchpad, oops. I live in that place RIM is from so I at least know how hard the PlayBook is failing. I wasn't trying to impact anything, just give my opinion on tablet display sizing.name99 - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
Reviewers of Surface, for the most part, disagree.Death666Angel - Saturday, December 8, 2012 - link
I use my tablet for playing games and watching my movies and shows when I'm on the train. Why are you telling me how to use my tablet?coder543 - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link
How is 4:3 just amazing for books and web browsing? You're not *used* to browsing in a different aspect ratio so you say it's worse. I owned the iPad 1 and used it for a full year as my primary compute device. I even typed a 10 or more page document on the touch screen. I'm very familiar with it. But I can tell you that browsing on a 16:10 display is a wondeful experience, and now that I've gotten past the 'weirdness', I see numerous advantages for it.headrush69 - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link
What makes it's so wonderful?I find it funny because on the desktop with that same ratio, most web sites don't really seem to take advantage of the space and a full screen web browser is mostly wasted space.
Maybe you go to site's optimizing for a mobile browser, but for me, I want the normal site on my tablet, I'm not on a small screen phone.
eallan - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link
Numerous advantages that you didn't list for what reason?name99 - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
It IS wonderful if the primary material you read on your iPad is technical PDFs. Use a decent PDF reader to crop the margins, and you'll find that the content of pretty much all technical PDFs is at 4:3 ratio.darkcrayon - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link
Well, the 3rd gen iPad got dinged for not having enough GPU to drive its pixels... And here we have the Nexus 10 with even more pixels than the 3rd gen iPad, but even less GPU muscle. "Much better tablet"? Ehh not seeing it. And no points for "proper aspect ratio", it was even explained in the article that it's a tradeoff. If you can't see why it isn't helpful to have an aspect ratio that is close to that of typical paper documents, I don't know that to say...coder543 - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link
The Nexus 10's GPU muscle isn't properly represented by some benchmarks. It is honestly a cross between the iPad 3 and iPad 4 in terms of performance -- far from being worse than the iPad 3.What is the aspect ratio of legal pad? When you need paper that gets stuff done, you don't use anything resembling 4:3.
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link
A4 paper aspect ratio is about 4:3. I know because I read PDFs on my iPad for work all the time, fits perfectly in portrait mode.Landscape is ideal for web browsing and applications, the extra vertical space is always a good thing. Its the same reason my desktop and laptop monitors are 16:10, much better than 16:9.
All 16:9 is good for is video, and I do way more than just that on my tablet.