The big 8 megapixel test

Image noise, optical properties

Sticking to their bad habit, the manufacturer’s didn’t reveal any kind of information about the type and size of the image sensor in their phones, although we would be very interested in the second info, as it would be required to calculate the view angle of the cameras’. According to our sources Samsung Innov8 is the only handset to have a sensor from a compact camera, others have a smaller chip – of course this is unofficial information, we’ll see if the results support these speculations.

Not knowing the sensor size, we had to estimate the view angles. There is no optical zoom on any of them, so the angle is fix, but it would be impossible to convert them to the miniature camera system, so we can only have an absolute order. But this is rather simple, as C905 has by far the lowest angle, but Renoir doesn’t see much more of the world either. The two Samsung models have about the same views, there is a rather big difference between them and the previously mentioned two handsets. The Samsung phones can have about 36 – 38 mm of focal length, while the other are somewhere between 40 and 45 millimeters. For the sake of those who are not very much into photography let’s say that from the average user’s point of view, in the case of devices with a fix focal length, the bigger view angle is the better, as this means that when taking a picture from a fixed position, “more things fit” in the picture – the smaller number means the bigger angle, an average camera is around 35-38 mm, while lens at 28 mm or less are wide-angle lens.

And now let’s see noise level and noise filtering with the help of these test pictures:

Samsung i8510 Innov8 / Samsung M8800 Pixon
(100% cut)

Sony Ericsson C905 / LG KC910 Renoir

We hope that everyone can see that Innov8 is completely different from the other. This is the only handset where the texts can be read. The next one is Pixon, which might not have a much better image sensor than C905 or Renoir, but it has better software processing, as Sony Ericsson’s phone – similarly to other handset from the manufacturer – has too much noise filtering, while Renoir practically doesn’t have any. Of course this is exaggeration, based on noise level and noise filtering we think that LG’s phone has the weakest image sensor of them all. The acerage image size is in accordance with the noise level, Renoir takes the smallest picture, Innov8 and C905 are about the same medium level, but for other reasons: Innov8 has less noise, but has more details, while C905 takes noise-filtered pictures. Pixon, however, won’t save space, it takes the largest pictures, which should mean that these pictures have the most details, but in fact that the average amount of details is joined by a lot of noise.

Before getting to the test photos, we’d like to note that Sony Ericsson C905 is the only handset from the four where we can clearly spot chromatic aberration. This phenomenon is the bug of low-quality lens: it can be observed in the case of contours with high contrast difference (for example a tree’s branches in front of the sky), as the outline gets a purple color. The situation is not that bad as in the 5 megapixel handsets from the Japanese-Swedish manufacturer, but it’s rather sad that they won’t correct their own errors.

The software is also highly different. The most settings are on the two Samsung phones, they have a single serious lack: they can’t shoot image sequences at full resolution. Renoir and C905 are both weak from a couple of points of view, for example the SE won’t allow us to manually set sensitivity, it has only two JPEG compression levels, we can’t turn on either blink detection or backlight compensation, or gridlines and it has no center-weighted light metering. On the LG we can’t set light metering at all, but we can tamper with sensitivity and it has the extras I’ve told you before. Another negative thing is that they have half the preset modes than the Samsung phones, and furthermore we can even set edge sharpness on Innov8 and Pixon, but not here. I would also like to note that higher dynamics range (from software), the face recognition focus and the GPS-tagging are available on all models, C905 is weaker as it can’t focus on smiles. Here is the fully detailed specs table:

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!