14 Responses:

1. robotdevil says:

   10 years ago at 1:09 am

   I might actually switch to a 3gs. left in car one day at toorcamp, not in the sun, and the .5mm thick flexible layer of plastic that gives the phone the smooth touch surface boiled and blistered, and cracked. The plastic underneath didn't crack, just this weird adhesed crap.

2. i_e_d says:

   10 years ago at 5:01 am

   Can't be much worse then the camera on the G1 in low to dim light

3. injector says:

   10 years ago at 6:31 am

   Looks like it is attempting some sort of noise reduction. Being that it is working on a single frame all it can hope to do is combine information from neighbors, which will always result in a loss of detail.

   • jwz says:

     10 years ago at 8:44 am

     And the Treo camera didn't have to work under these constraints.

     So what.

     • injector says:

       10 years ago at 8:53 am

       I meant it as the designers must have thought, "lets add this new, fangled noise reduction so we have an extra box to tick on the features list." But in reality any sort of noise reduction which can be implemented to be instantaneously applied by a low power chip is going to produce worse results than the human brain just looking past the random values.

       I know complaining about noise reduction here does no good. Just, I'd like to see people show a little more restraint before employing the technology. It does have a place, and needs to pass through its own uncanny valley before people learn when and how to use it. We're just left to suffer in the meantime.

4. jered says:

   10 years ago at 8:26 am

   I can only assume that the phone manufacturers think that we want shitty cameras in our phones, because it's not like they're saving more than a dime a unit having them be so bad. "This picture looks too nice to be from a phone camera, you're obviously lying!"

   • lifftchi says:

     10 years ago at 9:06 am

     Yeah, I pretty much think of the cellphone camera as the Lomo without all the pretension.

     But I don't see how the camera could be much better with current technology. It's still got a tiny fixed-length lens. I sometimes imagine a cellphone built around its camera. In my mind it is about the size, shape, and heft of a Curta mechanical calcuator.

     • jered says:

       10 years ago at 11:37 am

       You can definitely do better. Go look on Flickr at photos from a Nokia N95, for example. Pity about the OS.

       • feignedapathy says:

         10 years ago at 12:50 pm

         S60 isn't /that/ terrible. It just got a bit left behind, is all.

         The real pity is the development tools for S60.

     • badc0ffee says:

       10 years ago at 1:03 pm

       Sony Ericsson makes a line of Cybershot phones with a fairly large lens and flash.
       This one has a 8 Mpixel sensor (I know, not an indicator of picture quality): http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/c905a?lc=en&cc=us

   • rodgerd says:

     10 years ago at 1:19 am

     This is why I ended up buying Sony Cybershot phone. No, it doesn't have all the joys of a decent phone OS on it, but it takes pretty decent pictures, which I actually rate a lot more highly in my list of stuff I need.

5. rapier1 says:

   10 years ago at 10:33 am

   Its kind of amazing how much it sucks as a camera but overall I'm still happy with mine.

6. redgrittybrick says:

   10 years ago at 11:38 am

   Whilst I realise this is primarily a forum for JWZ to extract info from the lazywebs, I can't help but ask whether the Pre is worth getting (instead of a Jesus phone) for someone recently bereaved of a Palm T5. Everything posted here makes me worry that the Pre won't easily sync my calendar, contacts and hundreds of memos with some non-Borg apps on my several PCs.

   Please say it ain't so.

   • jwz says:

     10 years ago at 1:27 pm

     The Pre is very much a "beta" phone. As is all of the associated software. This is very, very annoying, but possibly it will improve.

     But it has a real keyboard. I will never buy an iPhone, because the on-screen keyboard is bullshit.