iPad Air 1 vs iPad Air 2: Camera comparisons

We took these shots in the Macworld photography studio, under studio lighting and generally excellent conditions. The iPad Air 2 captures noticeably more detail - check out the greater pixellation around the robot's eye on the lefthand shot.

Here's the full studio lighting test shot taken by the iPad Air 1. Click to see it at a larger size.

And here's the full studio lighting test shot taken by the iPad Air 2.

The iPad Air 2's camera doesn't always make good on its theoretical superiority over the iPad Air 1 - in these shots of St Pancras Station, taken outdoors in decent daylight conditions, it's tough to tell the two apart.

Here's the full outdoor daylight test shot taken by the iPad Air 1. Click to see it at a larger size.

And here's the full outdoor daylight test shot taken by the iPad Air 2.

We deliberately set up an awkward shot here - an office block against a bright but cloudy sky, creating complex lighting conditions and a silhouette subject - to see how the iPads would cope.

As in the previous standard daylight shot, the two iPads proved too close to call.

Here's the complete advanced daylight test shot, as performed by the iPad Air 1. Click to see it at a larger size.

And here's the iPad Air 2's effort.

In very low-light conditions the iPad Air 2 again shows clearly superior performance. Neither shot is anything to write home about (bear in mind that the iPad Air 2 still doesn't come with a flash) but the newer model's camera produces less noise.

As in other comparison illustrations, we've zoomed into both pictures and placed them alongside each other. Actual, full-size shots will show less obvious pixellation and noise at standard zoom.

Here's the full shot taken by the iPad Air 1 in very low-light conditions.

...and the iPad Air 2's take on the same shot.

Both the iPad Airs are able to handle skintones well. In our test photos of the editor-in-chief's boat race it was tough to tell the iPad Air 1 and iPad Air 2 apart - if anything, the Air 2's shot seems fractionally more blurred, but we're pretty sure this is just down to experimental inaccuracy (ie the photorapher's shaky hands).

Here's the full face test shot taken by the iPad Air 1.

And here's the face test shot taken by the iPad Air 2.

Finally, we took this daylight, high-detail shot of a tree. (This is a zoomed-in detail of the full shot, although in this case we've zoomed in less extremely than before.)

The cameras on both iPad Airs handle the shot effectively; there's little to choose between them.

Here's a larger version of the foliage test shot taken by the iPad Air 1. (It's still cropped in a little, since the full-size shots were too large for us to use online.)

And here's the cropped-in version of the iPad Air 2's foliage test shot.

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