I told you last night that the Camera application in the iPhone 5 is the only one which benefits from the improvements brought by Apple to the system of recording pictures in low light conditions. We are basically talking about software changes that improve the photo recording system, and the third-party applications in the App Store have not yet implemented them. Even if now the Camera application is the best solution for taking pictures and recording videos at night, in the future application developers will have the opportunity to implement exactly the same changes with the help of APIs made available by Apple.
While it's not documented yet in the AVCaptureDevice Class Reference, taking a peek at the “AVCaptureDevice.h” class header reveals the related properties:
lowLightBoostSupported
lowLightBoostEnabled
automaticallyEnablesLowLightBoostWhenAvailableThey chose to make the low light boost mode optional, as the increase in light sensitivity comes at the cost of some increased noise (not surprisingly). Making it optional was a good decision.
The developer of a photo application from the App Store says Apple allows developers to use strings in applications that allow recording good photos in low light conditions, and a future version of its application will contain support for such a thing. For now I don't think there is any third-party application that benefits from this system, but in the coming weeks more and more will be updated and then you will be able to give up the Camera application when taking pictures at night.
