Babies and Mobiles – part 2: gimme a good camera
By Ben Robinson on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 5:07 PM PST In Ideas and rants
I am sure you weren’t all expecting the second part to this commentary so soon – well here it comes!
My wife and I agreed since way before our baby was born, that we were going to take lots of photos. Maybe not so many videos, but certainly capture (and print) lots of photos. We both own 7 Megapixel cameras, but in the last 18 months or so, I’ve barely used mine. The thing that triggered this was the K800i and K810i, both of which had (for the time) stunning 3.2 MP cameras – I thought, why should I lug my camera around when the one on this phone does the job so well?
Anyhow, time passed and currently I have one of (I’m not saying which one) the crop of 5MP cameras out there – and there are now lots of them. You would think that when the market is awash with 5MP cameraphones, that they are gonna be pretty good right?
Well, when we were taking our first tentative photos of our baby, I used my cameraphone – I reasoned that the Manufacturer is telling it IS that good, the optics sound swish, and most people rave about it – so it’s gotta be good, right? Wrong.
What we found, on checking these pics out on the PC, was that both the focus wasn’t great, plus, the noise in the picture was quite substantial. It was only rammed home when I got a copy of a single pic that was taken by relatives, on an old Kodak 3MP camera – suffice to say the proper camera pic blew my “5MP wondercam” pics out of the water.
And so here’s what I contend – cameraphones are handy, they are convenient, they are flexible – but in no way are they yet ready to replace the ‘traditional’ digital camera. I’m sure quite a few of you might disagree, but then when you re-check the quality of pics you’ve taken, I defy not to notice that the quality isn’t quite there!
(I appreciate both parts 1 & 2 of the Baby Mobile diaries have been a bit down on technology, so to end on an up-note: can anyone name the model (not manufacturer, that’s easy) of the Mobile that is in the pic above – it was one of the first Mobiles to have a camera attachment – 10 points on offer here! For an extra 20 points, can you tell me the number of colours that the screen of that Mobile suported…..?!)
t68
I agree wholeheartedly. I just hope the next crop of mobiles dont increase the Megapixels but improve the sensor/lense/whatever need to be improved to get it up to say 3Mp quality levels of dogital cameras. My old Sony 3mp took fantastic pics – my 5Mp mobile does..but only in the right conditions, and even then not as good as the 3mp camera. Come on Nokia, lets pull one out of the hat.;)
Get a N82 and you are set.
SE T68 with 256 colour screen
T68i(The t68 was the ugly gold one) with 256 colors. And of course he has an N82 or at least a nokia n95 8gb like me, since he writes for intomobile. I bet no-man writting for intomobile wouldn’t have a smartphone. Thus viewty…nop,K850…ouch, samsung g600…be serious. And one thing for the article, I was trying to macro-shoot some tests in order to cheat on my exam(Where i failed actually, no comments please I will pass it next time). I have to say that my samsung V5(5 mp, 2004 model) wasn’t able to show the letters in macro mode. My N95 did. I have tha same idea about camera phones as the author but this incident 3 days ago showed me that things are about to change….
I,m gonna say Sony Ericsson T2oo which had 4 shades of gray.
Hi all:
@j0gee: yes!
@Chris P: yes, def-o!
@Afinis: yes! I couldn’t possibly comment on which handset I have
the K800/K810i have superb macro shoot modes, BTW, and they are only 3MP. But I think we are still a little way of hi-fidelity imaging from cameraphones. Put a digital camera and phone side by side, and test out the shots – I’m confident you can always spot the cameraphone…..
Ben