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Camera-phone buying guide





Features to look for

Lens
The quality of the lens is often the component that will represent the overall quality of your camera-phone. This is true of all cameras; film cameras and digital cameras alike. A camera-phone lens is much simpler than a digital camera lens, usually comprising three lens elements as opposed to the 11 elements in a digital SLR camera lens.


Even dorks use camera-phones.
To date the most impressive camera-phone lens we've seen is the Carl Zeiss lens in the Nokia N95, which takes exceptional photos considering the limitations of such a small device. Also, Schneider-Kreuznach have developed a reasonably good lens system, found in LG's Viewty, however, there is a considerable difference in the performance of this lens to the Carl Zeiss lens.

Flash
Considering the simplicity of the lens structure in a camera-phone, the image sensor needs all the help it can get to achieve a decent exposure. A flash is an absolute must, and it's surprising to see so many camera-phones are still lacking in this area. There are currently two options available to better light your subjects:

LED--Early examples of LED flashes performed similarly to a small torch providing a constant, yet dull, source of light. Now we often see LED flashes that "fire" when the camera exposes, as you would expect. Under many circumstances an LED flash will help achieve a better exposure, but not considerably.

Xenon--Known also as a strobe flash, a Xenon flash emits an extremely bright burst of light and is the flash of choice for camera-phones. A Xenon bulb can be shaped around the lens to reduce shadows produced by the flash during the exposure. Increasingly we are seeing Xenon flashes on higher grade camera-phones.

Zoom
Basically, there are two types of zoom: Optical and digital. Optical equals good, digital equals bad. Optical uses adjustments in the distances between the elements in the lens group to achieve the zoom and should maintain a sharp image, whereas, digital zoom works like a cropping effect, selecting a portion of the image and blowing it up to fill the total size of the final image.

Focus
The majority of camera-phones are fixed focus, but increasingly we are seeing camera-phones with autofocus, and we look forward to future developments like face recognition. If your budget allows, choosing a mobile with focusing options will definitely help you get the most out of your camera-phone.

 

 
« Image sensors and the megapixel myth | Issues and pitfalls »

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