Almost as soon as the iPhone 5 had ended up in the hands of eager Apple customers, reports began to surface of an “issue” with the camera built into the device. The problem appears when users take photos that have a bright point of light — usually the Sun or a reflection of our nearest star — in or near the frame. The lens flare that appears has a unique color to it, showing up as a purplish-pinkish blob like that seen above in an image from Cult of Mac. Apple has now acknowledged the issue, although it’s not doing anything about it as it happens to a lot of lenses.

A reader at Gizmodo, Matt Van Gastel, sent some iPhone 5 photos exhibiting the purple smears to Apple for analysis after calling Apple Support for help. The response from Apple wasn’t exactly what Van Gastel probably wanted to hear:

Our engineering team just gave me this information and we recommend that you angle the camera away from the bright light source when taking pictures. The purple flare in the image provided is considered normal behavior for iPhone 5′s camera.

We’ve heard some unverified reports that the issue isn’t appearing on all iPhone 5s, so either the problem was recognized early and has been fixed in later manufacturing runs, or iPhone photographers are learning how to keep the lens flare out of their photos.

Have you seen this type of lens flare in your iPhone 5 photos? Let us know in the comments.

Apple acknowledges lens flares occur with iPhone 5 camera originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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