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The distance between the sensor and the lens needs to be the focal length to get a sharp picture if you focus on something that is far away from the camera. If you get closer to your subject the lens needs to be even a little further away from the sensor. So the lens needs some room to move.

A typical 1/3'' type phone sensor has a diagonal of ~ 6 mm. To get a typical wide angle shot the focal distance of the lens needs to be around 2/3 of the sensor diagonal, in this case roughly 4mm. So you need at least 4mm space between sensor and lens to focus at infinity (+ some 0.2mm for close up capability).

The only way to get around this problem would be a lower focal length for the lens. This would result in an even wider field of view on the same sensor size. To get the same field of view they would have to reduce sensor size. Smaller produce lower image quality (more noise, less dynamic range etc.)

Christian

Ok thanks. Just wondering what it was for.
 
Maybe, but I’ve heard that the camera will be improved. The new hardware could be lower profile. If not then no sale here I’m afraid.
I don't know. I can only think the people that hate the slightly protruding lens are people with a death wish using the phone naked. The cases i've used with my phone make the lens recessed, so im not sure what all the fuss is about!
 
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Good to know someone else feels the pain also (in relation to what I am talking about). People keep telling me on MR to get it replaced, no point , as you said it's a bit of a lemon, the replacement will suffer from the same issue. Really looking forward to 2GB model, cause frankly it's a crap experience, tempted to go back to the 5s, but battery is the problem there lol
Luckily I can use my wife's upgrade as she has no intention of ever upgrading from her 4" device. But she does suffer from battery issues on her iPhone 5. Luckily she works from home now so it's easy to keep it charged most of the time. I think we will see some decent battery gains in the 4.7" iPhone 6S due to smaller chip processes which are more energy efficient and allow for slightly more space for the battery. Furthermore the battery itself could be more slightly more efficient in utilizing the space it has. I think these slight improvements will lead to another 10% or so increase in battery life during the day, and when combined with iOS 9 will yield even more.

The next iPhone doesn't really need to be much faster. It's a freaking phone. I've never once thought my 6 Plus needed to be faster aside from the lag that isn't really seen on the regular iPhone 6. Maybe a faster video chip in the Plus for the extra resolution and scaling? It mainly needs to be more power efficient in the 4.7" model and hold more things in memory without crashing. A nicer camera would be icing on the cake, and for some reason I'm starting to think the next iPhone might have HDR Video, which you can accomplish by alternating scan line exposure during capture—or by recording 1080p at 120fps and alternating exposure each frame and running some averaging algorithms. Something like that would actually benefit from a faster processor and could be the next big feature for video so that skies and shadows are nicely exposed while recording.
 
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