how is the camera?

[takeshi]

I remember reading reviews that said that the camera lagged and didn't work well. Is it better now that there have been updates?

It's better but I wouldn't call it good.

It's certainly fine if you're shooting in sunlight or have plenty of light indoors. In low light situations, forget it. No software update can compensate for the shortcomings of the sensor or the optics.

The bottom picture looks good phone sized. But why does it look so poor when at slightly larger resolution?

That will hold true for any photo of mediocre to poor quality. Reducing the size makes it harder to pick out the artifacts. It's the same as hanging a photo on the wall and walking away from it. You can't make out the small problems from a distance.

So much dithering it's ridiculous.

It's not dithering. It's noise from gain. Software won't fix this. It's a limitation of the sensor. A longer exposure or combining shots might be a software solution but in a setting like that it wouldn't be a practical solution. It might work for landscape photography but the point of cameraphones for most people is snapshot photography, typically in less-than-ideal conditions.

Since people report that 3MP setting works very well, I'm wondering whether this is really an inability for software to take advantage of the 5MP camera's resolution.

This is posted quite a bit but I guess it needs to be posted again. MP is number of pixels. That's it. It has nothing to do with the color rendering, light sensitivity, contrast ratio and any number of other specs that affect image quality. A 5MP camera doesn't necessarily take better photos than one with less MP. Again, MP is just pixel count. More MP doesn't give you better low light performance. If doesn't reduce noise. Etc etc... Think of it like the resolution setting on your PC's monitor. Higher resolutions don't affect other aspects of the image -- you're just changing the number of pixels.

With standalone digital cameras the models with higher MP tend to have better overall performance than those with lower MP but MP has been overrated as a measure of image quality. Shopping solely on MP is like shopping for a car and only comparing HP. You need to consider the whole picture (pun intended).

 

[slinky]

Thanks Takeshi. I understand completely about the MP issue but perhaps there is a reason why shots at a lower MP look better than those at the 5MP setting - which look like garbage. If you reduce the image size of the 5MP pictures, they begin to look better and hide much of the horrible job done by the optics/sensor at the full setting.

You're probably on the right track. I know what I see and only partially why but not sure what is responsible for what. Looking at every picture taken at 5MP I see - you're right that dithering may not be the right term - but there are like a moire effect, circles that are a little too large that comprise of a color area. There are areas of color that should have a gradient effect but, instead, are more solid and appear quite off when viewed at the larger resolution. As I said, I get many of the same issues when a JPEG's quality setting is set too low to output the photo properly, although not always the same thing.

What boggles my mind is how Motorola thought it was going to release this camera at all. Thankfully I don't really use it that much but for such a high quality phone, it was surely going to make people furious that do use it. Perhaps some idiot in marketing said "use the 5MP... ads are everything!" So they did. And then got numerous releases panning it and anyone serious about photos was warned in the store about expectations so that the return rate would be curbed. That I can see happening.

 

[smokiedabong]

Please vote for these issue , maybe they will fix the camera app by Android 3.0 Issue 5386 - android - Video recorder dims camera in low light rather than brightening it - Project Hosting on Google Code

 

[slinky]

There are about 1000 more critical issues that I am aware of and a whole bunch that haven't been fixed in 8 months. Scary if you ask me.