I won’t be eligible to upgrade my iPhone 5 at a bid discount for another year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t drool at Apple’s latest offering.

My excuse is that I’m reading reviews of the iPhone 5s camera! Yup, browsing around online photo sites finds quite a bit of discussion of the new phone’s photo features.

Over at Digital Photography Review, for example, an editorial comment: “Why I can’t stop taking iPhone Panoramas.”

I want to take a quick look at what I think is the strongest feature of the new iPhone: its panorama mode. Now, automatic panorama modes aren’t new, they’ve been around for a while, and the feature is now almost standard in most mid-range compact cameras, many smartphones and even some mirrorless cameras. iPhone users have had the functionality since the launch of iOS 6 last year. But the panorama mode in the iPhone 5s is a little different, and that little difference is seriously impressive.

It got a little bit buried in the presentation of the phone (Shiny! New! Fingerprint sensor! Comes in gold!) but for me, the iPhone 5s’s panorama mode is definitely its most interesting photographic feature. Why? Well, it’s just ridiculously good, that’s why. Very fast capture (30fps as you pan across the scene), a simple and effective UI, and spookily accurate stitching make the mode useful, but the killer feature is what Apple is calling ‘dynamic auto exposure’.

Available in the iPhone 5s only (presumably because of the processing power required) dynamic auto exposure is basically what it sounds like – exposure is automatically adjusted dynamically across a scene, as you move the phone to create the panorama. So if your scene incorporates bright and dark areas across its span, the phone will take that into account and adjust the metering as you go, delivering a final composite image with a balanced exposure.

The column includes quite a few sample photos as well. Worth checking.

An Australian reviewer says he started out as a skeptic, but “after 12 hours of using the new phone I was completely won over…”

Looked at from a technical perspective, the iPhone 5s camera is another casual step forward for iPhones. And with the exception of the clever flash system, most of the photographic improvements seem to come from its processor, rather than from revolutionary hardware. The biggest change lies in the extra speed and flexibility.

But I’d argue that technical innovation is not what this phone is about. I’ve found the iPhone 5s to be the most fun iPhone camera to date. Instead of extra pixels, I’m enjoying the speed, performance, and the new party tricks of burst shooting, slow-motion video, and easier, better low-light shooting. It’s the most ‘invisible’ of the phones, as it just gets out of your way, so you can enjoy what you’re doing. If you like shooting on smartphones, I’d recommend that you give it a try.

Finally, the conclusion of a review on TechCrunch:

So, we’ve got a bunch of improvements here that cross over from hardware to software and touch on user experience. All three Apple’s strong suits when it comes to integrated devices like the iPhone. If you peer more closely though, the biggest differences between an iPhone shooting experience and that of a traditional camera comes down to one thing: the image signal processor in the A7 chip.

The aperture isn’t that much bigger than competitors and the pixel pitch is actually smaller than the HTC One, for instance. And the sensor, though increased in size, is very tiny when compared to even point-and-shoot cameras.

The differences, then, come largely in how Apple’s ISP hardware and its front-end software mesh to make life easier for photographers. There’s a quote on Apple’s iPhone page which I think is nicely phrased:

“It just makes more sense to teach iPhone how to take a great picture rather than teach people how to be expert photographers.”

Those small point & shoot cameras that have flooded the market in recent years may still be capable of turning out more technically proficient photos, but I would say that’s another whole market that is going to disappear as phones continue to incorporate photographic advances.

In the meantime, I just have to hold back my techno lust for a noter 12 months.