New 4th Generation iPod Touch Good For Photographers?

I know a lot of people use their cell phones for point and shoot cameras these days, but what about an iPod? Looks like Apple wants to make the iPod Touch more appealing to users, and photographers as well.

Chase Jarvis released a book a while ago with photos all taken with an iPhone 3GS, and none of them were bad by any means of the imagination. So what if you want to have one of those snazzy, popular Apple "i" products, but don't want an iPhone? The new 4th Generation iPod Touch might just be the ticket for you then. It has the same screen, processor and cameras as the iPhone 4, which means that you should be able to get some rather good images out of it.

One of the cool features Apple has also added in the photo app is a new HDR feature. The new feature will come in the yet unreleased iOS4.1 update in a few weeks. If the HDR feature is on, the camera will automatically take 3 photos in quick succession. From those photos it will make an HDR photo for you. In what I consider a good move, Apple made the photo app keep a copy of the exposure the metering system suggests without HDR applied.

If I wasn't planning on getting an iPhone 4 next year, I would get this new iPod Touch in a heart beat. I carry much touch with me almost all the time, whether at work or just out with friends, so that would mean I'd always have a usable camera with me. My cell phone has a camera, but getting the pictures off it is a pain because the software for it only works in Windows. Not only that, but I cannot pull photos off the built in memory! Photos can only be downloaded if they are stored on a mini SD card! Even if getting the photos off my phone wasn't a pain, the 2MP images it produces aren't very good. To put it bluntly, I wouldn't want to use them for anything more than making wallpaper for my phone.