Considering how much time I invest in camera gadgetry, it might surprise you that most photos I take is with my smartphone. Not because I'm particularly pleased with its quality (I'm not) but because it's almost guaranteed to be with me at any given point in time.
So far, I've been continually disappointed.
Now it didn't help that my first camera phone was an LG Shine - a dumb phone. And although it was only 2MP, featured a tiny little screen on which to view the image, and despite it not having loads of photoshopping apps that can modify every pixel - yet it is the only image that I've blown up to an 8x10 image and hung it on my wall. Yes, the image in a Loblaws under fluorescent lighting is still one my favourite images that came from a phone.
The LG Shine was followed by a Blackberry Pearl. It had three megapixels instead of two. The quality was a huge step backwards. Video was likewise atrocious.
So after a few months, I moved from Telus to Mobilicity and with the transition, I switched to Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. It was a mind-boggling 8 megapixels - even more megapixels than my D50 dslr. Quickly you realize that megapixels are irrelevant. Somehow I know this, yet I keep falling back on it as a way to gauge camera quality. It makes no sense to me at all.
The X10 was a huge step up from the Pearl. But I had almost, ALMOST gone with Wind instead of Mobilicity, and I could have gone with the Motorola XT720 aka Motoroi which had a Xenon flash. Most smartphones have LED flashes - very bright, very small and very annoying little lightbulbs in the front of the camera that irritate anyone you photograph. The light is often a little blue, making your subjects look deathly pale at best, and over-exposed bleach white at worst. But the XT720 instead uses a real flash - the same type of flash on Point & Shoot and DSLR cameras. It would even set off my slaved speedlites (that I use with the DSLR for studio shoots).
I know this because I brought a speedlite in with me to the Wind store to test it. There was an enormous potential for an awesome camera phone from the XT720. However...
It wasn't as good spec-wise. It had an 8MP as well, the better flash but a slower processor. The X10 had more RAM, more storage, better processor and I found out within weeks of buying it, a planned upgrade to the latest version of Android 2.3 (after much complaining from their buyers). But it didn't have that amazing xenon flash.
Fast forward to now. It's been basically a year since I switched to Mobilicity, and the savings in one year has paid for the X10 (compared to if I had just stayed with Telus until my contract ended). And what does one do when they save so much money in a single year to buy a phone for free?
Why you start looking for a new smartphone. Maybe one with that Xenon flash I wanted so much (fat chance - unless you live in Japan where they have 3 of 'em). Nope. I have to compromise.
Mobilicity/Telus/Wind all have the HTC Amaze. I played with one today. It takes less time than a Point & Shoot to load the camera app from the lock screen (as fast as my DSLR goes from off to on - seriously that fast) and zero lag to take the shot (it actually cache's the image to achieve this).
It also has not one, but TWO annoying LED flashes in the front to bleach out your subjects - though of course you can turn it off.
So tonight I'm looking at the full-size sample images:
http://androidandme.com/2011/10/devices/a-closer-look-at-the-htc-amaze-4g-camera/attachment/imag0059-2/
And to be honest. The pictures suck. I suspect the person taking the pictures - an Android enthusiast - has no idea what a good image looks like. And the noising, blurry images can in no way be described as "super sharp." But he simply might have shaky hands. Or he's just bad at photography. Or whatever.
So I go back to my X10. View the images at 100% using Picasa, looking at the EXIF info to see what ISO, shutter speed and aperture is used. The great, clear images are the ones on bright sunny days when the shutter speed of 1/250 or higher is used with an ISO 50 (little noise). A few indoor images are okay - they're sharp enough because I steadied myself against something solid. But the 1/8th of a second shutter speed cannot make a good image hand-held. They just blow.
So they I started looking at my wife's iPhone4 images. They're awesome... if they're outdoors. I see the high shutter speeds make the image sharp, but only if there's light enough to expose the image. Lots of indoor shots are just as lousy as the the indoor shots of the X10. And the iPhone4 never seems to nail the white-balance... though that can be fixed easily enough.
So now what.
Although selling my soul to Rogers/Telus/Bell at $55-$75/month to pay for an iPhone 4S might be an option, I suspect that despite all of Apple's screaming that this is the best camera phone ever, it'll still be plagued by poor images if taken indoors. There's only so much that a sensor the size of my little fingernail can do.
What I'd really like is if a phone app came out with more control, so I could set the ISO, shutter speed and aperture directly, rather than relying on "Portrait" and "Sports" modes. Just have a few settings that can be directly set.
Maybe there already is. To Google!
