Apple has army of 800 working on iPhone camera alone

Apple has hired more than 800 engineers to work only on perfecting the most-used part of the iPhone - its camera.

It may seem like a lot for one piece of a phone, but the tiny camera module on the iPhone 6s Plus is made of 200 individual parts, said Graham Townsend, the senior director of camera hardware, who oversees the iPhone's camera app, in a TV interview.

"To capture one image, there's actually 24 billion operations going on," he added.

One way the small army of engineers has made family photos better is by building a way to counteract people's shaky hands.

Inside the camera are four tiny wires, each half the width of a human hair. The four wires create a "microsuspension" of the camera parts that can absorb the shaking from hands to get a steady shot.

Townsend's team also has its own lab to test how the camera photographs in different lighting situations. The engineers have to calibrate the camera to take the best shot, whether it's the bright light of high noon over the camera or the yellowish dim of sunset.

Just this year, Apple upped the resolution of the camera for the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus from 8 megapixels in the iPhone 6 to 12 megapixel, and the front camera from 1.2 megapixel to 5 megapixel. There is a new flash as well which adjusts to the colour and lighting of its surroundings to offer accuracy.

Users can now also shoot video in 4K resolution, whereas they were previously limited to full-HD. Autofocus was also improved with more focus pixels, while colour accuracy was boosted with a new image signal processor. Apart from optical image stabilisation for the iPhone 6s Plus, the company had also introduced the new live photos feature.