Apple is planning to release a fix for an iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro camera bug that causes black boxes to appear in photos. CNN Underscored's Henry Casey discovered the issue in an iPhone Air review when snapping photos at a concert.
He said that one out of every 10 images taken with the iPhone Air or the iPhone 17 Pro had "small blacked-out portions, including boxes and parts of white squiggles" that showed up from the LED board at the event.
Apple told Casey that it's an issue that can occur in "very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera." Apple has a fix, and plans to release it in an upcoming software update.
Apple did not provide a timeline on when the software update might be released, but the new models are set to launch on Friday, September 19.
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This appears to be a similar glitch to what some RED cameras used to do in their HDRx mode, when combining multiple shutter exposures into a single image for better dynamic range.
I'm guessing the lines are from some kind of sharpening algorithm that got scaled or timed incorrectly, and the black spot is a failed merge of different exposure in that spot. Concerts can be quite flashy and cause things like shutter speed to change rapidly, so I'm guessing something in the pipeline lagged a bit too much.
Image taken by CNN Underscored's Henry Casey
