Forget about taking nice photos of your kids skiing – you need flash to light them up against white snow. But your great new iPhone X just cannot do it. For unknown reasons, its flash is just not working in temperatures closed to zero (0ºC = 32ºF).
I am testing iPhone X right now for my photoblogs – and yes, it it really a nice piece of hardware which will change the photography world more than it seems right now.
But apart of many positive feature, the flash issue is just really hard to believe. I am testing in now in the mountains of my native Czech republic. Sadly, the winter is rather mild this year with temperatures hovering around zero. But still, it makes iPhone X dysfunctional in quite important aspect: the ability to use flash.
Why iPhone is not working in cold weather? Nobody seems to know
During the test shooting I was going to do some routine shots of my kids against the backdrop of hill covered with snow. It is a very typical case when using flash is essential, without its light, any person would be just a black silhouette in white field…
But no, my iPhone X just was not able to fire the flash… It made me nervous, so I tried many times with different settings but with no results…
Only after intensive googling I found several posts about the same issues – but wait a minute, I was not in really cold weather. I am sure the temperatures were above zero and my iPhone X was in a very warm pocket of my jacket nearly all the time.
So no extremes at all – but stil, I was not able to find a way to make it work… The only obvious possibility to make flash work is to move iPhone X to a warmer room. It resuscitates itselves after a couple of minutes…
Is this a bug? Or a build in feature?
When reading similar stories, what stroke me most was the simple fact that nobody seems to know why this is happening. I tried to change different setting, but nothing really helped. Which is strange…
Some time ago, Apple was fixing some issues with unresponsive display in cold weather, but it was presumably resolved with an update… But no word about the flash not working…
By the way, my display froze once with the photo app unresponsive, see the printscreen… I cannot be sure that it is connected somehow, but again, it is strange. It never ever happened to my on my good old iPhone 6.
So what is going on? Why iPhone X does not like cold weather? Sure, it could just be a build in feature, although I cannot really see what might be the reason.
More likely, it is just a bug which was not for some reason addressed yet… Why I think the iPhone X’s problems with flash in cold weather are caused by bug?
I was really trying many way how to make the flash working – I tried, for instance, to switch on the flash in dedicated photo apps, in Manual and my favourite ProCamera… Both they have its option to switch the flash on and off…
Not only it did not work, but my experiments totally messed everything… ProCamera simply stopped working and was flooding display with Error popups… I should say it never happened before, I am using ProCamera for three years (in iPhone 6) and even several days of testing of iPhone X were perfect… But suddenly, when trying to switch the flash on, it just collapsed…
Rebooting iPhone was not enough, I had to erase ProCamera App completely and reinstall it (for the first time in three years!)… I doubt it is normal – so it makes me think that this cold weather flash issue is an iPhone’s bug… Hopefully, I can be fixed in future updates…
If you find some miraculous cure, let me know in comments!
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