Three Samsung Camera-Phones Reviewed

To say that camera-phones have come a long way, is a little bit like saying that Google dominates the online ad-space.
Sublimely understated, that is.

Picture this: It’s 1997. Phillipe Kahn, whose wife is about to give birth, is naturally, really, really excited about little Sophie’s impending arrival, and he wants to get pics out in hyper-time. You see, Phillipe’s a geek, through and through (no, seriously, this is the guy that founded Borland, Starfish, LightSurf and Fullpower!) and the existing methods just aren’t fast/slick/geeky enough for him.
So he wires up a digital camera and a cellphone, and seconds after joining the human race, Sophie’s pics are electron-zooming to all the Kahn family and friends.
Voilà! The camera-phone has arrived!

Fast forward to 2002. Nokia releases it’s latest, greatest shiny new phone. The model designation is 7650, and the specs are drool-worthy. It’s the first smartphone using the Symbian Operating system from the the Finnish cellphone giant, and, it has a built-in camera, another first. The camera has a whopping 0.3 MP (no, that’s NOT a typo) CMOS sensor, and digital zoom. I was fortunate enough to be in my Vodacom contract upgrade window and snapped up an early arrival at my local VodaShop. What a phone. Amongst all the lovely techie stuff, it had the new Espionage ringtone, and receiving a call in a crowded room immediately identified you as the coolest dude alive. The guy with a 7650…Y’know, the phone from film Minority Report with Tom Cruise? Yeah, that one…

Now, lets be clear. Pictures from even the vaunted 7650, were little better than a 5-year old with a box of crayons. Tiny, blurry, murky, noisy. I firmly believe the cred was to be had in the action of whipping out your phone and snapping a photo, thus activating the very pronounced shutter sound, to the amazement of your friends and colleagues, not in the actual sharing of blurred, washed out, what-on-earth-is-that? images. But, it was the start of something that would grow like topsy, to the point where in late 2008, for every cellphone sold without a camera, four were sold with camera’s. And in early 2009 we had bought over a billion camera-phones.
Perspective. That’s more than the combined total of film and digital cameras EVER sold.
That’s right, there are more camera-phones, than cameras.

But are these REAL cameras?

OK, so lets fast forward again, to the present day. What’s the state-of-play with camera-phone camera’s? Are they still just a happy-snap device? Or are they real camera’s, with some respect due? To answer these questions, we gathered up three camera-phones from one of the hottest camera-phone players and set out to shoot them like a DSLR, with the same expectations. Think of it, as the expect the best and measure the short-fall, approach.

These are the phones we had to test:
A 5MP Samsung Omnia, an 8MP Samsung Pixon, and an 8MP Samsung Innov8.

Why three phones from the same manufacturer? Simply because the agency who handles the brand, was enterprising enough to step up first. Props, Cerebra.
So, lets get to it.

Samsung Omnia 5MP

This is the sleekest and sexiest of the three phones on test. Very, very clean and pretty. Unfortunately, it’s a Windows Mobile device. And not a new version of WinMo, which is improving in leaps and bounds, but an old cranky, clunky version. Interestingly, the camera app appears NOT to be a native WinMo program. In fact, it’s Java, I believe. And, it’s not bad. The controls are clear and bright and easy to use.

Sadly, the camera is less stellar. In fact, it’s so bad, we’re going to spare it the embarrassment of even being compared to the other two.
And. Let me be clear. It’s not awful because it’s only a 5MP device. It’s awful, because the sensor is simply mired in the same generation as the operating system. It’s low-light noisy, the colour reproduction is poor, the focus is soft. And so, without labouring the point any further, we’ll move on…

Samsung Pixon (8MP)

The M8800 Pixon is the newest of the three units in this review. Not by much, mind. It uses the TouchWiz user-interface, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that it uses the same Java camera app as the older Omnia. That’s not a bad thing though, as I noted, the app is clean and intuitive and everything is at your thumb-tips. Now while the UI seems to be the good, the image processing is less good. Despite features such as face detection, geo-tagging and smile detection, the Pixon lets itself down in basic exposure processing. The balancing act between aperture and ISO, which is required to keep the shutter speed up (for sharp images), is simply flawed, and often, the shutter speed would drop too much, resulting i soft images. I’m guessing this might be in response to the ineffectual built-in noise control software, and that the hardware team simply had nowhere to engineer it right, economically. That said, in the right conditions, the Pixon can produce pleasing results.

Samsung Innov8 (8MP)

The Innov8 is the surprise in the bunch. Not the latest, not the generic, a little edgy with it’s non-standard, neon-wireframe interface icons and cool blue selection glow. But it comes with one of the best camera’s I’ve found in any camera-phone. For example:

EXIF: 1/125 sec shutter speed, f2.6 at ISO 50 (set manually)

That’s a tough picture to make. It has a wide range of exposure, some tricky dark areas (with noise-potential), some very bright areas (close to blow-out) and some delicate colouring in the sky. The Innov8 handled it. Very, very well.

Of course, I cheated a little. I DID have Wide Dynamic Range option turned on. WDR is Samsung’s silver bullet for small-sensor camera’s, which cleverly lightens up shadows in high-contrast scenes. As you can see, it works really well. The built-in noise reduction processing is also pretty special ensuring that even when WDR weaves it’s magic, noise doesn’t become a problem.

Another example:

EXIF: 1/500 sec shutter speed, f2.6 at ISO 50 (set manually)

This one, shot in macro-focus mode, in low, warm late afternoon sun, shows remarkable control in the red/orange spectrum, an area which often trips up camera-phone image processors. Not so, the Innov8. The colour is bright and true and this has not been achieved at the expense of the much cooler background, either. Impressive.

And the winner is?

By now it should be painfully obvious that the Samsung Innov8 stands head and shoulders above the other two camera-phones in my opinion, and being shot as a DSLR, ie using manual setttings mode wherever possible. Images are clear, sharp, with superb exposure and colour control. Nice one Samsung!