As everyone on the planet reported when the iPad 2 was announced, the rear-facing and front-facing cameras on the iPad 2 are a handy addition, but not that useful for any real photography or for high-def video chats.
It's unfortunate, because if the quality had been higher, the iPad 2 could have become an excellent chat tool.
First, for photography, the rear-facing camera records video at 960x720 but, in our tests, looked grainy, washed out, and almost unusable.
Worse, the 0.7-megapixel camera is almost laughably bad. That's problematic for another reason: holding the iPad 2 (or any tablet) in landscape or portrait mode and trying to hold it steady for a photograph is not an easy process.
Most test images looked slightly blurry.
The front-facing VGA-resolution camera is not any better. You can capture 0.3-megapixel still images, but it's nearly impossible to use it for anything other than grainy-looking self-portraits.
In a FaceTime video chat with a friend across town, the video quality looked remarkably similar to the iPhone 4, but not in a good way.
Amazingly, Apple does not offer any extra control over photos: setting a custom white balance, or selecting a scene. It's just plain vanilla shots.
Other multimedia
The iMovie and GarageBand apps provide some exceptional multimedia capabilities, though. In many ways, they add a whole new level of usefulness to the iPad form factor.
That said, the iMovie app is fairly limited: you can chop in video clips and add a quick dissolve or spotlight effect, but you can't add titles or other transitions.
GarageBand is a marvel, though. The app includes countless pianos, guitars, drums, and other instruments. Most importantly, these instruments, particularly the piano and drums, respond to soft touches and hard finger presses accurately.
And the iPad 2 also has an excellent built-in microphone: our test tracks recording an acoustic guitar sounded richer than we expected. Once again, the A5 processor helped make both apps enjoyable to use and handled processing tasks without any hiccups.
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