MobileBurn reviews Samsung's five megapixel camera phone

From Gizmodo I found MobileBurn's review of Samsung's five megapixel SCH-S250 camera phone.

MobileBurn says the phone is big and heavy, has a great display and an excellent user interface for taking photos.  MobileBurn has a long, detailed analysis of the camera but the one sentence review is:  "It's good, but not on par with a dedicated camera."

The camera can produce very good photos outdoors on a sunny day but under other conditions the photo quality is disappointing, in large part because of the poor white balance (see below).

Don't dismiss high resolution

I suspect some analysts will look at the images of "super high resolution" camera phones (super high resolution being -- what? -- four megapixels and above by today's camera phone standards) and dismiss them as producing photos that are often inferior to a regular digital camera with lower resolution (three megapixels or less).

A few points:

1.  How good do camera phone images have to be for handsets to begin supplementing and replacing point-and-shoot film cameras and low-end digital cameras?  Some of today's camera phones with one megapixels can certainly supplement and even replace in some cases traditional cameras if you just want 4" x 6" snapshots.

2.  There's no doubt, however, that a good "good enough") flash is a big advantage of point-and-shoot film and low-end digital cameras ("low-end" begins -- where? -- two megapixels or less).  An optical zoom can make a big difference, too.

3.  This is just the beginning of the introduction of super high resolution camera phones.  There will be significant improvements in optics that produce better images.

In other words, any analyst who makes fun of these higher resolution camera phones or dimisses them -- without taking into account the dramatic, rapid advances in camera phone performance during the past several years -- should him/herself be dismissed.

Comments

[Tychocat]

The reason camphones are desirable is because of the cellphone form-factor. Cellphones look cool. Even most PDAs are nice looking, but cellphones are definitely cool. No one would buy a PDA in the shape of your average 35-mm. camera, because you'd never fit it into your pocket, and heck, cameras look like cameras. Likewise, no one would buy a cellphone which was shaped like a camera.

This form-factor is one heck of an engineering restriction, not to mention the self-named gadget gurus who strictly value cellphones by weight (for reasons I can only guess at, 100 grams appears to have been designated the heaviest your average geek can comfortably carry; every gram above this arbitrary limit gets snippy mentions from a lot of no-doubt exhausted reviewers).

I'm therefore guessing that camphones will probably lag 2-5 years behind regular digital cameras, just because of the additional engineering challenges of squeezing the camera into the cellphone electronics. I'm also guessing we're not going to see any real advances (a real flash unit, not just a white LED light, and the equivalent of a 80-125-mm. zoom lens) until battery tech improves, and someone designs some really nifty new optics.