iPhone’s lens coating
What’s this?
No. Not an alien relic depicting Earth during the days of Pangea.
It’s the surface of my iPhone’s outer lens which has lost ~85% of its anti-reflective coating. When I received my iPhone, there was already a very small area of the lens coating which had flaked off. Since its purchase, I have always carried the iPhone by itself in my pocket, so the rest of the lens coating has worn off from what can only be minor cloth abrasions, akin to “polishing” off the coating.
I haven’t decided yet whether it significantly affects the photos taken with the phone. I tend to doubt that it does. Perhaps the discontinuity of the lens coating might reduce the sharpness of the iPhone’s camera, but I don’t think it’s very sharp in the first place, particularly since the aperture is fixed at 2.8, and because the sensor is not very sensitive and requires a lot of light—even with such a wide aperture—to take decent photos.
This poor quality lens coating is the only major design flaw I can identify with the iPhone. And it may not be so much a design flaw as a sign of the poor state of the art of lens coatings. I don’t really know. A cursory search reveals that other iPhone owners have been noticing the same problem, and some users report convincing Apple to take their iPhone in for replacement of the outer lens.
One user reports that the sharpness of his photos returned to the level of a new iPhone after all the anti-reflective coating had worn off, which makes some sense.
For the time being, I don’t have any plans to request a lens replacement from Apple. I think it’s more of an unsightly nuisance than anything else.
wow, you are a major dork :)
man…. i just thought that was a grease smudge from my fingertip.
i wonder what’s the safest way to remove all the coating
Hello from Spain, a have the same problem and the quality of piks was too afected. I recover 100% of quality polishing the lens with a white dust an water with a soft paper, that is used for the cristal polished.
Sorry for my inglish…
I just want to leave a quick note here that:
1) the lens on the iPhone is, indeed, plastic, not glass. I know this for a fact. I used acetone to remove the coating and it ate into the lens. It’s plastic. Definitely.
2) I found one source for a new lens (after a lot of searching and email):
It just arrived today and it’s an exact replacement (minus the decorate silver bezel, which you have to grab from the old lens).
Just thought I’d post something to try to help out.