Samsung i450 review – Camera

Once again, the continuation of our Samsung i450 review, this time we are comparing its camera to the mighty Nokia N95, in the important aspects.

We know that you can't really compare a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus to a 2 megapixel camera, but this isn't a test to see who wins, but just to compare the standard.

The camera is most probably the lowest point of the phone. It is a 2 megapixel camera, but in most environments and conditions it proves to be slow in capturing, or better, processing the capture.

There is no autofocus, but that is probably not the reason why there is such a horrible focus. The close-up mode is the worst, as it is difficult to tell what's going on due to the lack of settings. You can also see that with the N95 on auto mode, macro shots come out pretty bad. There is a need of manual settings. The reason I only took shots in automatic mode both with the N95 and the i450 is to show you that this is probably a lack of software settings, and maybe not hardware fault, whereas in hardware fault there could have been a wrong choice of focal length for the camera, or the simple lack of autofocus. At the left is the i450's capture and at the right is the N95's image. These are original (not modified or compressed) 2 megapixel camera shots.

This regular shot shows you the focusing problems, and this is most probably hardware choice issues. You cannot see the building in the background as it's “whited” out  by the i450. If we take an extract of the images, it is also noticeable that the shovel captured by the i450 is too bright, which leads to us thinking of brightness capture problems, whereas in the N95 the shovel it is much more solid-looking. Both images were taken at a 2 megapixel resolution at the same time in the day.

The night-capture images show a strong flash from the i450, but a total loss of focus, you can't really tell what is what, and if you were to take a family photo in the middle of the night, you might as well do a oil painting.

Unlike in the NSeries S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 camera application, the i450 has no options at hand, and the shortcuts for the settings are on the numeric keypad. Samsung should know by now that most people don't like taking pictures with the numeric keypad open, it just feels too big.

In the screenshot above the quick settings are featured: Brightness, white balance, and colour tone. Once again, these settings should have been on the viewfinder as icons, even though it isn't a camera-focused device.

Subscribe to our RSS feed as we are going to publish the next chapters of our review very soon!