Consumer Reports to the rescue, says iPhone 5 isn’t the only phone with purple haze issues

Consumer reports decided to due diligence to the now famous purple haze picture associated to the iPhone 5. Their findings are indeed surprising. They placed the Android fan favorite Samsung Galaxy S III and Motorola Droid Razr Maxx in the same testing conditions as iPhone 5, lo and behold, they too suffered from the purple haze issue.

But it didn’t do so in any more pronounced a fashion than did the iPhone 4S or two Android-based smart phones, the Samsung Galaxy S III and Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, when we tested those under the same conditions. In the course of our tests, the haze was sometimes purple, but sometimes another color or even a rainbow.

All camera lenses, even those made for expensive SLRs, can yield lens flare, which is produced by scattered reflections inside the lens from a bright light source. How much flare appears in an image depends on how you orient the lens.

Interestingly enough, science of lens flare aside, we have never heard of wide spread reports of purple haze from the iPhone 4S or even the GSIII. Not to say anyone is arguing that it can happen, perhaps a better stance is why did it surface so abruptly on the iPhone 5? Why has no one noticed this on other phones before?