iPhone 4 has trouble focusing

[Merkie]

I received my replacement iPhone 4 last Tuesday, but it's been having some focus issues.

Whenever I open the camera app, the camera has a hard time focusing, even in perfect lighting conditions. Whenever it focuses, the bottom left part is somewhat in focus but the rest is kind of blurry. About 1 out of 10 photos come out ok, the others are out of focus. The weird thing is however, that when I tap to focus, the pictures always come out sharp as they should, across the whole frame. This makes me doubt whether the issue is hardware of software related, because it is perfectly capable of taking a sharp image, it's just that an extra tap is required.

My iPhone has iOS 5 on it, so perhaps it's an iOS 5 issue? I've never had a different iOS version on it installed, so I can't compare. It's quite weird. Some sample pics can be found be found below. Note: I always held the camera very steady and I didn't move the phone at all while focusing. The lighting is somewhat dark, but I can assure you the same thing happens in good lighting conditions. Please look at the sample pics 1:1 (100%).

Example 1 (out of focus)
Example 2 (somewhat out of focus)
Example 3 (same as example 2, but now I've tapped to focus right in the center of the image)

 

[cababah]

Try to tap and hold on the screen to lock the focus and see if that helps.

 

[Givmeabrek]

Poor lighting conditions but it looks like OK. Autofocus cameras are pretty dumb. Unless you tell it where to focus it will grab the closest object that shows enough contrast for it to focus on. It's not magic. You have to help it out.

The first shot may be focused on the bushes to the left. Try taking the shot and see where it is focusing or tell it where to focus.

 

[Merkie]

Try to tap and hold on the screen to lock the focus and see if that helps.

It helps, read my post again. That's not the issue. The issue that is the phone is unable to take a decent photo without tap to focus (which is unacceptable to me). Im trying to determine if it's hardware of software related.

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Poor lighting conditions but it looks like OK. Autofocus cameras are pretty dumb. Unless you tell it where to focus it will grab the closest object that shows enough contrast for it to focus on. It's not magic. You have to help it out.

Both shots are focused on the closest car in very dark conditions. Looks OK.

Look at the houses in the top left corner. They are incredibly blurry while the car isn't. This shouldn't be the case! The phone should have equal sharpness across the whole frame since the closest object (the car) is about 3 meters away, and everything from 50cm to infinity has to be completely in focus with such a small lens.

Also look at the photos at 100%. http://i.imgur.com/DcmtI.jpg]This example has perfect lighting conditions, but the right half of the photo is just a smear of details.