i8910 has an 8 megapixel autofocus camera, just like Innov8, but unfortunately we have no information regarding its technical specs, even though it would be important to know if this is the same image sensor that was used in Innov8 (the one that has the same size as one in a compact digital camera), or if it's Pixon's bit lower quality sensor.
It's a fact that improvements have been made (no matter which model are we comparing i8910 to), as the phone can record 720p HD resolution videos - this means 1280 x 720 pixels at 25 frames/second with an aspect ratio of 16:9, having 921.600 pixels per frame. Videos are recorded in MPEG4 format, we don't have much settings to change in this matter: we can opt for a lower resolution (720 x 480, 640 x 480, 320 x 240 pixels), apply some effects, turn on the LED light, which is quie powerful, or choose a fast- or slow-motion video (from 1/8 to 8x speed), but there is no image stabilizer. Another problem is that autofocus is turned off during video recording, although this might change in a new software version, as the icon for focusing is displayed, it just won't work.
Otherwise image quality is great, we have never recorded such things with a mobile phone in Europe. I won't keep playing for time, click here to see a two and a half minute video recorded at 720p resolution, which took up 200 MB of the handset's memory - which can be expanded, by the way.
We have more options when taking pictures, let's take them one by one. We can turn on image sequencing, take panorama and mosaic images, we have smile focusing and macro mode - this is enough for most users. Those would like to tamper with additional settings, there is no problem: sensitivity can be set between ISO 100 and ISO 1600, besides this we can set light metering as well. I'd rather not waste the characters for evident things (white balance, JPEG compression, etc.), as they can all be found in the menu of the camera's software. Otherwise the highest available resolution is 3264 x 2448 pixels.
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Image quality is good, but not as good as on Innov8. The test photos you can see above are taken with default settings, automatic sensitivity and center weighted light metering - this last one might have been the reason that many pictures are slightly overexposed. The dynamics range doesn't seem to be too high, we can see burned out parts on quite a lot of photos, but fortunately not on every one of them. We can notice some chromatic aberration too, while noise level is a bit too high even with the ISO 50 setting used by the AUTO mode. The colors, however, are bright enough and edge sharpness is quite good, so even in spite of the negative aspects I can say that i8910 can replace a low-resolution compact digital camera, we'll get excellent quality prints on 18 x 13 cm photo paper, and the flaws I have mentioned cannot be noticed when shooting at 2-3 megapixels.
That's all for today, we'll be answering you questions related to the phone in our next blog post.
Translated by Szaszati
