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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Krysto - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link
Why would the aspect ratio matter in calculating the surface area?thunng8 - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link
Of course aspect ratio affects areaTake an extreme example a tablet of length 25cm and width of 1cm. Surface area is 25cm^2. Diagonal is still 25cm. ( to be more precise 25.02cm).
gnx - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
As I mentioned, I find both a 7.9 inch ipad mini and galaxy note 8.0 (which is really closer to iPad Mini) both too cramped and small, as I use the table for foremost as a document reader on the go. And just to add, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 was 1280:800, thus 16:10, making even overall space closer to an iPad.Finally, for practically reasons, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 was nice, since because it's height in portrait mode was almost identical to an iPad 2/3/4, just narrower in breath, I could chose from most iPad accessories such as any carrying cases, pouches, bluetooth keyboard, etc.
yoshi1080 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
I still love my iPad 3, but I'm thinking about upgrading. I do a lot of stuff on it and sometimes I wish it'd be faster. The iPad Air should be around 3–4x faster, right?Two of the most demanding tasks where I wish my iPad was faster are photo and video editing. I've already read that iMovie is supposed to be really fast on the iPad Air, so that's a clear advantage. My iPad's speed is sufficient for JPEG editing, but RAW processing (with PiRAWnha) is practically unusable. Processing RAW photos on my iPad would be my dream because photo editing on it is just so much more fun than on my iMac with the dreadfully slow Aperture – I'd be happy with getting 90% of the quality, but RAW is mandatory for me.
Up until now I thought the iPad Air would be much better suited for PiRAWnha. But now Anand writes about the RAM bottleneck due to the 64bit architecture and this makes me wonder: On the original iPad, the app often complained about too little available RAM and eventually crashed. I feel like the 1GB RAM on the iPad 3 is the reasonable minimum – would the Air be a disappointment in that regard? On the other hand, Adobe is working on bringing Lightroom and those smart DNGs to the iPad, and the beta version has even been shown running on an old iPad 2.
darkcrayon - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Apps just don't need as much RAM as we think they do, especially mobile versions. Sometimes I'm surprised what can still run just fine on an iPad 2 (also helps of course that only one foreground app needs to run at a time). The Air should be 4 times faster than the iPad 3- should be no contest, especially in CPU.Death666Angel - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Well, using one app at a time is fine, but browsing the web with a few tabs open and then switching to one or two other apps gets Apple device quickly ejecting stuff from RAM, where my Nexus devices are still having the pages loaded. :)fteoath64 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Thanks for the detailed review!. As I suspected the A7 behavior would have been rather different to wring out more performance out for the iPad as compared to the iphone. As you stated in the power consumption measurements, it seems the A7 is rather power hungry and only aggressive power management gets the battery life it needs. I am sure, it would be waiting for the TSMC 20nm process node as it seems this chip is just at the brink of 28nm as it is today. In making, the battery last so long without negatively impacting user performance, Apple has done a great job to achieve the balance using software. From the power draw alone, I figured out why it was clocked at such speeds instead of 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz. It cannot afford the power budget associated with it!.iwod - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Sk Hynix Just announced a 6Gb LPDDR3. A Maximum of 3GB when 4 of them Stacked, Interesting isn't it?How about 2 Channel use? 1.5GB of Memory? May be a big company / customer would like / require this ?
While I hope Apple will give us 2GB in next generation. The reality may very well be we get 1.5GB of memory only.
bigup - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
is the 1GB RAM really a deal breaker? sold my ipad 3 to buy the iPad Air but now having seconds thoughts - what do you think?darkcrayon - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
It's not a deal breaker. You could argue in 2 years it would be better with more, but you're already the type of person that sells their less than 2 year old iPad for the latest, so... ;)