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Sunday
Jan242010

Camera Phone Photography

DateSunday, January 24, 2010 at 8:49AM

I thought I'd show off a few photos I took recently with my Palm Pre to give everyone an idea of the quality of pictures taken with the device.  All have been reiszied for space and bandwidth considerations but if you check out my Flickr feed you'll be able to see them at full size (and more!).

Here's a tricky lighting situation for the Pre, basically towards the coming sunrise but also fighting the street lights as well.  There's a bit of noise but you get the idea.

This one is a bit better but you can still see a bit of "flare" where the sun is about to come up.  However, the Pre does do a good job of catching the variety of colors in the sky.

Here's one of an empty bus I was riding Saturday morning and is a good example of how the Pre does a fairly decent job of capturing color under artificial lighting (and while riding a jostling bus!).

To be certain the Pre is not a substitute for a "real" camera (digital or film) but it does get the job done when you want to catch those "moments" of life.  I typically use it when I see something interesting that I want to share in my daily travels OR when I'm around the house and the cat is doing something cute.  The "shutter" speed is fairly fast for a camera phone, almost one snap a second, which means that it's easier to capture stuff on the fly without waiting too long between shots. 

One other thing I've noticed about pictures taken with the Pre is that they look better when they are reduced in size from their original.  Again, if you check these photos out on my Flickr feed and then look at the original uploads you'll see what I mean.  Then again, this is a symptom of most digital cameras that aren't at least DSLRs and especially with camera phones in general.

Oddly enough the best camera phones I've ever had a chance to use were by HTC.  For a while I had a Touch Diamond and then this past fall I got two weeks of hands on time with the HTC Hero on Sprint.  Here's a picture I snapped with the Diamond.

This was taken about an hour after sunrise back in June.  That is not noise fuzziness but rather burning off fog.

Here are a few pics that I got to take with the HTC Hero before I had to send it back.

 

In this one the Hero was able to capture a star in the morning sky, something I've not seen a camera phone do before.

Downtown Raleigh, early morning.  Even in the full sized image you can see some amazing detail in this pick.

Taken on Capitol Blvd. in Raleigh.  These cars were zipping by at a pretty good clip and you can still hardly detect any blurring.

Boo trying to help me out when working with the Hero back in November (I couldn't resist getting a cat shot in!).

Obviously the photos taken with the HTC Hero would be slightly better based on the fact that it has a 5MP sensor to the Pre's 3MP one.  There were two downsides though to using the Hero:  the trackball is the camera button as well as the digital zoom button which makes for some interesting challenges and the Hero lacks a flash.  The upside on the Hero was on device editing as well as various camera settings whereas the Pre has NO options other than flash, auto flash, or no flash.  That's a big draw back for the Pre.

However, there is no doubt, to me at least, that the Hero is the better camera phone of the two devices.  It just does a better job at colors and handling multiple lighting situations.  The camera functions on the Hero are tempting enough for me to think about getting one.

What's the worst camera phone I've ever used?  Easily the Blackberry Curve 8330 I had for a while last year.  Then again that phone had so many issues I refuse to even consider getting a Blackberry device for the next couple of years.  It was that bad.

Over the next year we should be seeing even better camera phones coming to market.  Motorola has one coming up that is an Android device and has an 8MP camera and a nice flash.  The HTC phones I've been tracking online look to improve as well, both WinMo and Android phones.  I have no idea if Palm is going to do anything better on the camera front.

One thing that is factoring into any decisions I make as far as phone purchases go this year is the quality of the photos they take.  I do not like carrying around more gear than I need to on a daily basis and I've all but stopped bringing any sort of digital camera with me daily so this is an important factor for me.

AuthorMike P. | Comment3 Comments |
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