My New Nemesis, The iPad mini

I don’t think the iPad mini likes me very much. This is an update regarding the picture quality of the iPad mini when used as a doc cam. Upon further research, it turns out the rear camera on the mini should be just as good as the iPad (3rd & 4th Gens) so I have no idea why I was getting such pixelated images when zooming compared to my old iPad (3rd Gen) during my doc cam testing. I decided to run the test again. Here is a picture of the setup:

 

iPad Doc Cam

 

And the results:

iPad 3rd Gen Full Zoom

iPad 3rd Gen

 

iPad mini Full Zoom (From same height, with same lighting and pointed at the same document)

iPad (3rd Gen)

You can see the iPad mini image is much more pixelated. This is not a function of the picture upload or it being encoded for the web. This is how the two pictures look on the iPads. You’ll notice how crisp the camera icons are in the iPad mini screen shot above.

So what am I doing wrong here? Shouldn’t the iPad mini have better picture quality than my old iPad 3? I’m staying away from the mini for teachers mainly because of this issue. Now I’m a little concerned given that they should all have the exact same cameras. Anyone care to test this with a 4th Gen iPad?