Last week we printed our preliminary evaluate of Apple’s new iPhone SE. In the piece, I had remarked that the digital camera was comparatively disappointing and suffered from an absence of element in photographs, with the cellphone’s digital camera seemingly affected by optical weaknesses that manifested in partially blurred out photographs. This was fairly puzzling because the iPhone SE’s digital camera module ought to be of the identical design as that of the iPhone 8, which produced sharp pictures.
I had notified Apple of the outcomes forward of the publication of the article, and the corporate communicated again that that they had not seen such outcomes earlier than, and that they weren’t what was anticipated of the brand new iPhone SE’s digital camera talents.
The firm determined to dispatch out a brand new cellphone, and to gather my preliminary unit for evaluation. I exchanged items earlier within the week, and was capable of retest the brand new cellphone’s cameras.
In the brand new digital camera samples, we are able to see a dramatic enchancment in sharpness of the photographs, and the brand new cellphone reveals not one of the optical points that had been initially described within the article.
Although I wasn’t capable of check each items side-by-side, because the previous cellphone had been collected on the identical time, right here’s some comparable scene photographs (though they’re achieved on completely different days with completely different lighting circumstances) between the 2 telephones:
One can instantly be aware large enhancements in sharpness, with the brand new cellphone now performing pretty much as good as, and even higher, than the iPhone 8.
I’ve utterly up to date the preliminary digital camera analysis with new samples, and all criticism concerning the element retention and optical efficiency of the iPhone SE naturally don’t apply any extra, with the cellphone now performing excellently in that space.
Read: Updated iPhone SE Quick Camera Evaluation
For transparency’s sake – we’ve saved on the previous web page with the previous samples within the article in order that readers can see the variations between the 2 items.
Post-mortem
Overall, the brand new replace is each excellent news and dangerous information. The excellent news is that the iPhone SE ought to characteristic a a lot better digital camera than initially reported, and I hope that’s what most customers will expertise.
The dangerous information is that we nonetheless don’t precisely know what went flawed with the primary unit – what I don’t doubt is confirmed is that it suffered from a producing defect within the optical system of the digital camera.
The drawback with confirming such a situation is that it’s not possible that I used to be extraordinarily unfortunate in being the only real particular person receiving such a pattern, as normally one-off faults like these are insanely uncommon, with the extra possible situation being some type of systematic failure for a complete batch of items.
As an anecdote, the final time this occurred was a number of years again, with preliminary manufacturing runs of Huawei’s Mate Eight having digital camera focus points, and this was confirmed to be defective manufacturing of the preliminary batches reasonably than simply my unit. The concern was partly resolved by software program updates, and absolutely resolved by a recalibration within the manufacturing strains.
For such a QA-issue to occur to Apple is extraordinarily uncommon, and to their credit score, they took it very significantly with a immediate response and machine substitute. Only their inside evaluation will showcase the basis explanation for the issue, and sadly given the corporate’s extra secretive nature, we’d by no means discover out concerning the outcomes of that investigation.
We’ll be following up with a full-blown digital camera evaluation of the brand new iPhone SE (and a ton of different telephones we’ve got to compensate for!) within the subsequent few weeks.
