Camera

The camera has a resolution of eight megapixels. That’s a lot. It has a LED flash, there is no Xenon unfortunately, but we have a small mirror. We have to keep the phone horizontally when taking pictures and of course it has to be opened, otherwise we could take some nice black pictures of the phone’s back (even though the software won’t allow it). The button on the side is used for focusing and taking the picture, it’s a bit slow and somehow the phone we tested had no sounds either.

[+]

There is an impressive amount of functions, we can set the ISO value, we have preset modes, a wide dynamics range, image stabilizer, lots of resolutions, macro mode and blink detection as well. This last one is used for detecting faces on the picture and to observe if everyone has his/her eye opened. If they do, then it takes the picture and we shouldn’t have any “sleepy” subjects anymore. This could be combined with the smile detector, but usually our eyes get smaller when smiling and the software would detect that as blinking, so this has not been implemented.

When checking out the test pictures above it becomes quite evident that the number of pixels and the lots of pictures are not enough, and in fact we shouldn’t expect a better quality from such a slim phone. It’s interesting on the pictures taken with flash that stripes appear on them, but according to Samsung this problem won’t appear on the final handset. Nothing has come close to the leader Innov8, although the runner-up Nokia N86 might do something. UltraTouch, however, won’t. Probably the simple user won’t be interested in this, they just see that wow, it has eight megapixels, yours has only five and they go and buy it.

The gadget can record videos at 720 x 480 pixels, but we can choose other resolutions like VGA, QVGA and QCIF as well, of course our test video has been recorded at the highest possible resolution. The only problem is that the automatic white balance has been set so badly that everything became extra bright, but this will also be corrected on the final handset. Playback, however, was okay, movies at similar resolutions ran without a problem, DivX is supported, but I had some problems with pictures.

I have already hated this horizontal picture flow in Pixon, it starts running when the phone is tilted and now I have it again. You keep the handset horizontally, the pictures are loaded, you tilt the phone a bit in a direction and the software skips like 30 images and you can start playing around until you get the picture you want. And this is when the waiting game starts. It zooms in on the thumbnail, which is as pixilated as Test Drive 1 on a CGA monitor, and then we wait, and wait, and wait and then the photo becomes clear. Okay, I know that there are 8 megapixels to load, which means a minimum of 2 MB file size that has to be processed, but they might have matched the functions better and pack some more powerful hardware if they already have such a high-res camera. Fortunately we can access the pictures from the file manager as well, which is not that spectacular, but at least it’s usable.

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!