The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTCamera
Front and rear facing cameras are necessary features on all modern, premium tablets. The usage model for a rear facing camera on a tablet is hopefully not as a primary image capture device but rather a convenient one. The idea being that if you’re on location somewhere using the iPad for work or play and need to quickly grab an image, having a decent rear facing camera can come in handy rather than having to put away your tablet, pull out your phone and then switch back afterwards.
Apple has improved its iPad imaging systems almost every single generation. That being said, the iPad Air is a bit of an exception to the rule as it retains the same rear camera sensor as the 4th generation iPad. We’re still talking about a 5MP sensor with f/2.4 lens, although the iPad Air now has a wider field of view with a 3.3mm focal length (identical to the original iPad mini).
| Rear Facing Camera Comparison | |||||||
| Sensor | Resolution | Aperture | Focal Length | ||||
| Apple iPad Air | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | f/2.4 | 3.3mm | |||
| Apple iPad 4 | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | f/2.4 | 4.3mm | |||
| Apple iPad 3 | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | f/2.4 | 4.3mm | |||
| Apple iPad 2,4 | 0.7MP | 960 x 720 | f/2.4 | 2.0mm | |||
| Apple iPad mini | 5MP | 2592 x 1936 | f/2.4 | 3.3mm | |||
The rear facing camera tends to shoot at lower ISOs than the rear camera on the iPad 4. Since there’s no substantial change in the sensor or lens system however, the result is less noise but a darker image in low light situations. I suspect this might be more of a configuration default for the software layer driving the H6 ISP in Apple’s A7. Image quality is surprisingly good:
Even lower light shots come out fairly well:
Although obviously noise goes up appreciably once you get into really dark scenes:
I took a bunch of photos at the NC State Fair as well as on my trip out to Santa Clara following the iPad launch event in the gallery below.
Despite using the same ISP as the iPhone 5s, there’s no 10 fps burst capture mode on the iPad Air. Similarly there’s no slo-mo video recording mode either. The iPad Air does inherit the other benefits of the new H6 ISP however. Image capture is still insanely quick, which makes me wonder if the A7’s ISP also leverages that large on-die system cache.
| Front Facing Camera Comparison | |||||||
| Sensor | Resolution | Aperture | Focal Length | ||||
| Apple iPad Air | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | f/2.4 | 2.15mm | |||
| Apple iPad 4 | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | f/2.4 | 2.18mm | |||
| Apple iPad 3 | 0.3MP | 640 x 480 | f/2.4 | 1.8mm | |||
| Apple iPad 2,4 | 0.3MP | 640 x 480 | f/2.4 | 1.8mm | |||
| Apple iPad mini | 1.2MP | 1280 x 960 | f/2.4 | 2.2mm | |||
The front facing camera does see an improvement in sensitivity thanks to a larger sensor format. My understanding is this is the same sensor/lens combination as what’s in the iPhone 5s and 5c. Similarly to its implementation in the 5s, Apple seems to use the new front facing camera system to drive to lower ISOs and/or higher shutter speeds. You typically end up with a lower noise/sharper image, although sometimes there is a brightness/exposure tradeoff.
The other feature leveraged by the new front facing camera is the inclusion of a second microphone for noise cancellation. The goal here is to use the second mic to cancel out background noise and improve the quality of the audio you’re actually trying to record (presumably your voice during FaceTime for example). The impact is pretty noticeable. I ran an iPad 4 and an iPad Air side by side while playing a background track and have embedded the resulting videos below:
In the iPad Air sample video my voice comes across considerably clearer, as you’d expect given the Air’s second mic.
Video
Video capture settings look unchanged from the iPad 4. We’re still dealing with ~17Mbps High Profile videos from the rear camera and ~10Mbps Baseline Profile H.264 from the front camera.
Video quality out of both is pretty good for a tablet. In well lit scenes rear camera quality is definitely sufficient for sharing on the web.
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sna2 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
wrong.Most flash sticks are eMMC and they operate at 100MB/s to 200MB/s which needs usb3.
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Read speeds can easily exceed 100MB/s because reading from NAND is much faster than writing to it. Write speeds of 32GB or smaller flash devices can barely hit 40MB/s because the NAND itself can't write faster, and it's the write speeds that matter when syncing. Even if we're dealing with a full blown SATA SSD the write performance for 32GB models is around 40MB/s. Performance does scale with capacity so a 64GB or 128GB model will be faster but we are still far away from data rates over 100MB/s.fokka - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
this, so much. i'm always astounded when people bring up that they wanna see (e.g.) usb3 in their next mobile device. as if there are any current devices scratching on the 30MB-mark which would be totally possible with usb2, if manufacturers wouldn't insist on implementing bargain-bin nand and even shittier usb-controllers.FCsean - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
It would be stupid of them to put thunderbolt cables for iOS devices since more than half of the owners don't own a mac. USB 3.0 would be the way to go but not everyone has USB 3.0 so they're not yet wasting their money in manufacturing USB 3.0 cables since it's a lot more expensive to manufacture. I think it's two times more expensive.darkcrayon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Not only that, but am I the only one who rarely syncs large amounts of data at a time anymore with an iPad? Most of the sync is done wirelessly in small amounts over time. The only time I need a full many gig sync is when I upgrade devices or (extremely rarely) need to do a full wipe. Faster syncing would be nice but it's just not the daily process it used to be.Sushisamurai - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
...yeah.... I don't know about u guys, but is wireless sync all the time now, either comp to iPad or iPad OTA with iCloud, wiping my device q3-6 months. I have no issues with restoring a full 32GB, and it's pretty quick... Down speeds of 10MB/s wifi, 40MB/s LTE (OTA for both), but if I were to sync via comp, a HDD to NAND is pretty abysmal speeds. Not to mention, if it was TB/USB3 u're going to have a thickness increase, and I'd rather not. Inductive charging, if u recall, is a slow, inefficient form of charging. I'd rather have my full 2A going into my iPad versuses drawing the same 12W but giving me the equivalent of 6W wirelessly. NFC and tablets? Okayyyyyyyy there.petersellers - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Doubly stupid considering that thunderbolt runs on PCI express lanes and PCI express is not present in any of these devicesekotan - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
You can't have Thunderbolt without a corresponding Intel chipset, so forget about it on any ARM tablet. Also, the NAND used by these devices is so slow that having Thunderbolt would be utterly pointless. Most can't even saturate USB 2.0, never mind USB 3.0. Only the most recent Apple mobile devices have NAND fast enough to saturate USB 2.0.abazigal - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
I restored my 5s recently (coming from a 32gb 4s). The whole process took 1-2 minutes at most. Just plug in and click a button. Likewise, few people are so fastidious as to back up their devices via iTunes manually every day. The time savings from going thunderbolt is so minimal that unless your life somehow revolves around restoring thousands of these devices every day, I don't feel the benefits are worth the added cost.iSayuSay - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
And how Thunderbolt sync would help? Did you realize how much is the transfer rate from NAND flash in the iPad/iPhone? No more than 16MB/s, it's not SSD per say. It's a slow internal memory it becomes bottleneck. So as long as Apple do not change those (I doubt it will ever for the next 5 years), there's no point of porting Lightning to Thunderbolt or even USB 3.0 .. Ever.