Again, all straight out of the phone. Used the "Creative" mode for most of them: Pureview on, 5MP images, best quality JPEG. Pretty much everything else left automatic.
1. Croome Church. Reasonably well exposed. A little 'soft'. The 808 seems to use sharpening sparely, unlike most mobiles.
2. Statue. This I like.
3. Lake. This is a 34MP image. Well exposed, I think.
4. Tree. Wanted to see how well it did detail. OK, but some parts are out of focus. I could probably do a better job when I get more familiar with the interface.
5. Decor. Indoor, no flash. Colours are good and true here. Unfortunately, at 1/35 second, a bit of camera shake.
6. Flowers. Didn't blur this one.
7. Plaster. Would the flash reach the exposed brickwork? I think it did.
8. Light through window. Tricky to get exposure right. I'd probably fiddle a bit in PS with this one.
9. Sarah. Again a bit soft, blurred.
10. Verity.
11. Imogen
12. Sometimes you need a lens hood!
13. Indoor, no flash again. Worked better this time.
On the basis of this, I'm happy to use the 808 as "the camera I have with me". May not bother taking the DSLR to Spain this year.
So, what do you think?
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5 comments:
Tom wrote:
All looks very impressive and without pixel peeping, I'd be more than happy with those photos from a DSLR.
So how does the 5MP work with the 41MP sensor? Is it combining pixels to make HTC style "ultrapixels" for the final image, or does it just downsample in the phone? If you're in the 5MP mode, does this prevent the *very* impressive zoom features of the 41MP images?
As I understand it, the final 5MP images will contain pixels created from several actual pixels on the sensor. Supposedly reducing noise. When you zoom, the final pixels will be made of fewer sensor pixels, until you are fully zoomed and it's just 1:1.
Some of my frustrations with phone cams are:
Speed of use - slow to get camera up and running means missed shots
A hard-press on the physical camera button will fire the camera up even when the screen is locked. So a photo can be taken in a couple of seconds. The one of Imogen was captured this way: she won't pose anymore!
Ease of use - clunky interface, slow to change modes, switch on flash etc, so missed shots
The interface is better than most I've seen on phones. You can switch some things quite easily. That said, it will never be as good as all the dedicated buttons on a "proper" camera.
Capturing motion - landscape shots here look great, but assume you had the chance to consider the shot, take a few and play with settings - how is it for catching quick moments?
See comments above.
Poor low light performance (by low light, basically anything less than full sunlight!)
Haven't really pushed it in low light. Will give it a go. Did a few in-the-pub shots where the flash seemed reasonable.
Overly aggressive JPG processing which smears images etc
It does appear to do less sharpening and compression that most other mobile phone pictures.
Just saw your comment on depth of field.
This is probably the biggest weakness. There's a fixed f2.4 - although there are some suggestions that this is more like f7 due to the size of the sensor. Not sure I understand this.
Anyway, it is something - unlike ISO, flash, etc - you have little control over. There are articles on the net about how to manipulate it.
Try this again...
Head still hurting a bit about the 41MP thing. If you're in the 5MP "mode" does that mean you're not shooting at 41MP and not able to do that impressive zoom thing? Guess what I'm asking is, on the example shots you posted, would you be able to zoom into them without loss of detail?
Guess if you are shooting 41MP all the time, you're generating some pretty huge files?
Yeah, lack of dedicated shutter button on most phone cams seems such a missed opportunity...and not that hard to do. I'd be happy with just a button that could be set to a user defined function. Sadly S4 yet again lacks a dedicated camera button.
Apparently S4 shares user interface with its smart cams, so might be an improvement there on changing settings on one screen, rather than having to open a menu every time. With touch screen tech don't see why you can't have "virtual" physical controls overlaid onto the viewfinder.
And yes, welcome a camera which allows user to change more of the processing parameters. Understand why producing RAW images is probably technically difficult, would slow everything down and would TBH only be pleasing a tiny percentage of users. However, again, can't imagine it's that difficult to put in an option for reducing noise or sharpening (although suspect they don't do this because it would show up the limitations of the sensor and tiny lens without massive amounts of processing)
I suspect I'm asking too much from phone cams - I want it all really. Experience shows that, for me, the convenience factor is soon outweighed by the frustration I feel that I could have got a better shot if I had bothered to bring the DSLR or "good" compact.
When I've got time I'll try to put together some thoughts on the new Samsung with some samples.
Basically, if you shoot in 5MP mode, you get a 5MP image. Once it's taken, no zooming beyond 5MP.
The 34MP image on the page takes up 10MB.
An 8MP one about 2.5MB. As an aside, my old phone used to compress 8MP images to about 1MB - showing the differences in compression.
Ah ha - that makes it clearer.
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