Apple Say Motorcycle Vibrations Can Degrade iPhone Camera Performance

Riding high powered motorcycles not only cause problems for your neighbours, pets or any living thing within the vicinity of your exhaust, but they also cause problems for your very own iPhone.

Picture this, after a long ride in the valleys of your area, you stop by the road to take a quick photograph of your beast as she patiently waits for you to snap your photograph, you pull out your iPhone and notice that the performance of the camera, and the quality are not capturing your motorcycle in the way you envisioned.

This is because, a new post on Apple’s Support forum says exposing iPhones to high-amplitude vibrations, “specifically those generated by high-power motorcycle engines” could degrade the devices’ camera system. The company recommends against mounting an iPhone on a motorcycle, as the vibrations may be transmitted via the bike’s handlebars and chassis.

The new post also says that if you are planning to mount your iPhone to a scooter or a moped, it is recommended to use a vibration-dampening mount to lessen the risk to the phone and its camera system.

Apple explained the scenario technically, “If you accidentally move a camera when you take a picture, the resulting image can be blurry. To prevent this, some iPhone models have optical image stabilization (OIS).1 OIS lets you take sharp photos even if you accidentally move the camera. With OIS, a gyroscope senses that the camera moved. To reduce image motion, and the resulting blur, the lens moves according to the angle of the gyroscope.”

What happens is, long-term direct exposure to high-amplitude vibrations within certain frequency ranges may degrade the performance of these systems and lead to reduced image quality for photos and videos.