Two Megapixel Cameraphone Shootout 143
Siddharth Raja writes "It's been almost exactly a year since MobileBurn published their last 'horribly un-scientific' test of 1MP cameraphones. This time, they take the latest two megapixel models from Sony Ericsson and Nokia and put them through their paces.
The tests cover aspects ranging from lens distortion and contrast to exposure. Nokia's phone uses a custom lens solution from Carl-Zeiss, but it looks like the Sony Ericsson phone still has better optics. On the flip-side, the Nokia phone is better with colours and calculating the white balance."
Just what everyone needs (Score:4, Interesting)
I want a comparison with 2-megapixel CAMERAS (Score:5, Interesting)
My Canon SD110 "Digital Elph" served me very well for three or four years, until I replaced it with a 4-megapixel model. It had very pleasing color rendition. I've been quite satisfied with 8x10 enlargements from it even though they are very slightly softer than the pictures from my wife's 5-megapixel camera.
So the question for me is: if I was happy with a good 2 megapixel "digital camera," if I bought a 2 megapixel cameraphone would I be equally happy with it?
Now, *this* is the phone I want... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously - rather than trying to turn phones into appliances, Nokia should learn from Apple and see that what people want are tiny, elegantly simple gadgets that do just one thing and do it very well. Instead of a phone costing $900, make one costing $20, and you can expect people to buy many.
How about a phone stripped down to just:
- GSM module
- speaker
- mike
- battery
- on/off button
Carries a single number and dials this when it's switched on. About the size of a fat CF card. Pretty colors. Very cheap - $10-20. I wrote this idea up on: http://www.shouldexist.org/ [shouldexist.org].
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Warning: rant ahead (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only person who wants to know how, exactly, deciding which cell phone was better became deciding which camera was better?
What does a camera have to do with a cell phone, really?
When I went to buy a phone recently, the only thing any salesperson wanted to talk to me about was the cameras. I could not care less about the camera, but I ended up with one anyway. At the same time, a feature I really wanted to have - that my old, dying phone had - I couldn't find on any of the "better" new phones: a nested phone book, so that one name (one entry in the phone book list) could be associated with multiple numbers from which I could choose after selecting the name. Instead, every phone I saw had a strict one-number, one-listing phone book.
I really don't care if a phone has a feature I'm not going to use, but I do care if it has that and not features I actively want. Particularly when the features I actively want actually have something to do with being a phone.
[/RANT]
Re:camera phones (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Now, *this* is the phone I want... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Warning: rant ahead (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I want a comparison with 2-megapixel CAMERAS (Score:5, Interesting)
And, stupid as I might be, I can't help but wonder, why can't someone make a good mp3/camera/phone that isn't too enormously huge? Like, just the phone parts of the RAZR, with no mp3/game/camera stuff, and how much space could that take up? How small and light of a phone can we make, if it's just a phone?
Now, most of the parts are replicated for each device. The LCD screen, the memory, casing, battery, etc. So take those out of the equation. How small could Canon or Sony make a camera (even, lets say, a 1.3 megapixel), ignoring the LCD, casing, battery, or memory? If you took those parts, and integrated them into the just-phone-parts of the RAZR, how much space would that really take up? Now find a way to squeeze in enough parts to replicate the functionality of the nano, but again ignoring the casing, battery, duplicate functions, etc.
Ok, so maybe it stil wouldn't be the tiniest device ever, but given how these various companies can make single-function devices that are really tiny and most of the space is taken up by elements that are common to all of these devices, I'm consistantly disappointed by the attempts to make an all-in-one device. Even the expensive ones are horrible.
Can't someone make a decent camera-phone with mp3 functionality and 4GB of memory built in, and put it in a reasonable-sized package? Where's the culprit in preventing this? Bad engineering? Cell-phone carriers? Sony not wanting to damage their digital camera business?