The iPhone 4 goes to San Diego Comic-Con

With a convention center full of costume-clad fans, San Diego's annual Comic-Con is always a great opportunity to people-watch and take pictures. I dropped by Saturday to give the camera on my new iPhone 4 a good workout.

The camera is one of my favorite things about the iPhone 4. I've always liked photography. I don't like fooling around with settings, I just want to point my camera at something, take a picture, and share it with other people.

I was really looking forward to getting the iPhone 4, with its advanced new still and video camera capabilities. The timing, for me, was perfect; I got the phone a couple of weeks before Comic-Con, time to get comfortable with it before taking it to the show.

I'd already reviewed the iPhone 4 camera compared with the camera on the HTC EVO 4G, and made a complete comparison of both phones. But Comic-Con is a whole new level of testing for a camera, there's lots of stuff going on around you at all times. How well would the iPhone 4 fare?

Very well, it turns out. I was already very happy with the iPhone 4, and the Comic-Con workout makes me even happier.

Previous generations of iPhones had weak cameras, even by cameraphone standards. But the camera on the iPhone 4 is one of its great strengths. It's a respectable point-and-shoot camera.

Ease of use is its best feature. You just open the app, point the camera, and tap an onscreen button to shoot. There are minimal customization settings -- one to switch between the 5 MB rear-facing camera and the lower-quality front-facing camera, another to change settings on the built-in LED flash. By default the flash is set to go off automatically, but you can set it to always-on or always-off.

Photos taken with the iPhone seem more attractive in landscape than portrait mode.

Performance on the camera is extremely fast, with minimal delay between tapping the shutter button and taking the picture. On my past cameras, it felt like an eternity between my spotting a great shot, pressing the shutter button, and waiting for the picture to take. I missed a lot of great shots that way.

The camera takes clear, bright pictures, with vivid colors.

I love that the camera is Internet-connected; I can take pictures and share them on the spot on my personal blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, or -- using Posterous -- all of the above.

And that's all it really takes to make me happy.

One of my favorite apps for the iPhone is the $3 AutoStitch, which lets you take a series of adjacent photos and then stitch them together into a single panoramic photo.

View the full-size image, scroll left and right for the full effect.

I did notice some limitations to the camera. Most of these limitations are inherent to its nature: It's a point-and-shoot cameraphone. There aren't many settings to change (although serious shutterbugs seem fond of the $2 Camera+ app for filters, changing photo settings, and more). Likewise, you can't add lenses or an external flash to the camera.

Heavy camera use drains the battery. I started the day with a full charge at 8 am, by 5:30 pm I was down to a 10% charge. I don't like to be out and about with a cell phone drained that low. If I find this to be a recurring problem, I'll buy a Mophie Juice Pack or some other battery extender. But that may not be necessary; I don't expect I'll give the iPhone 4 as much of a workout as I did Saturday until, well, next year's Comic-Con.

On the other hand, the iPhone 4 has phenomenal battery life compared with previous generations of iPhones.

Even with the fast performance of the iPhone 4, it was hard for me to get off a fast shot if I wasn't ready with the camera already poised. Even if the camera was in my hand but switched off, if I saw a fast-moving shot, I had to lift it up, turn it on, unlock it, tap the camera icon, and then frame the picture. By that time, the photo would often be gone. I got a lot of great shots at Comic-Con, but I missed a lot more.

Because the rear camera lens is very close to one of the corners of the iPhone, I got an extraordinary large number of photos of my own fingers. I'll need to be more careful about that.

In addition to taking great still photos, the iPhone 4 is a great point-and-shoot video camera; the makers of the Flip have got to be nervous about losing market share. As a video camera, the iPhone is just as simple as it is for shooting still photos: Just point the camera, press the shutter button, and go. The iPhone 4 shoots 720p HD video. Audio quality is better than you'd expect, but still not good enough; in my videos taken Saturday in a noisy room, you can clearly hear me speaking, but not a friend who was standing about four feet away from me. If I want to use the iPhone 4 for recording interviews, I'll want to look into whether I can use an external mic.

One of the gee-whiz features of the iPhone 4 is the iMovie app, which lets you edit video directly on the iPhone 4. It doesn't come with the device, it's a $5 additional download. It's pretty amazing: You can stitch video together, change their order, add transitions, cut the length, add titles, add an audio track, and share the videos on YouTube and other services. It's easy-to-use, surprisingly powerful given the platform, and fun. And, now that I think of it, that's a good summary of the photography experience on the iPhone 4.

Here's the video I took at Comic-Con, shot and edited entirely on the iPhone 4. Warnings before you watch: It's a 4-minute shot of teh crowds on the dealer room floor. Most of it is just people walking around, some in costume, some in street clothes. There are a few shots of scantily clad people, and one situation which some might find suggestive. If that sort of thing offends you, take a pass on the video.

You can see where my finger got in the shot a couple of times, and the camera work is jerky, which might induce motion sickness in some people.

So that you can get a look at the iPhone 4 video quality in its native quality, I'm making it available for download, rather than embedding it: Download my Comic-Con 2010 video here.

View all my Comic-Con 2010 photos on Flickr. Also, Comic-Con 2007 and Comic-Con 2008.

P.S. For me, one of the photo highlights of Comic-Con was when someone asked to take a picture of me using my iPhone 4 to take a picture of a costumed fan.