The LYN Great Big Android Phone Shootout: Part 3 – Camera

In conjunction with our Wednesday photography features, we present you the camera test portion of the Lowyat.NET Great Big Android Phone Shootout (LYNGBAPS)! A Phone’s camera is a very important factor these days with manufacturers completely forgoing the OS experience for the sake of an amazing camera (you all know who i’m talking about!). With the tech in mobile phone cameras improving steadily, it’s no surprise that people are opting for their phones to be their main image capture device over a point and shoot camera these days.

How we tested the devices

For the LYNGBAPS we tested all the phones in 3 different situations:

1) Indoor with Fluorescent lighting

2) Outdoor daylight

3) Indoor portrait with flash

For all of the phones, we set them at the highest MP count, metering at default (usually centre weighted) and the scene mode to Auto. We also had the same focus point in the middle of each scene and tried to get exactly the same framing for all the phones. We shot each scene 3 times and picked the best result from each test. We will be testing the cameras using the same price groups and have picks based on each group and an overall pick in the end.

By no means is this a perfect test, as there are no color charts, DXO tests or even comprehensive testing, but when is the last time you shot a color chart? Hopefully with these “real world” tests you can judge for yourself which phones camera best suits you! Click on each of the pictures for a 100% full size file!

Get ready because this is going to be a long one! Test starts after the jump!

The “Low-Budget-Entry-Level-Bordering-Dumbphone” Group (Under RM600)

This group is quite unique in a sense that there is only 1 phone in it, so the test is just to show the quality of the camera. It will definitely not be the outstanding one in the test with 3.15MP camera with no focus feature and no flash, but fair is fair, so we had to test it anyway!

Indoors Fluoroscent

Outdoor Daylight

As you can see the colors are a little dull and the lack of sharpness is disconcerting, but to be honest, it performed better than I expected for what it is as a phone. For the price of the phone and the specs that it has, what can you do?

The “Value-For-Money-Entry-Level-Smartphone” Group (RM600 – RM1,000) 

Indoor Fluorescent

Indoor Flash Portraits

Ourdoor Daylight

 

This one is a little bit of a no brainer. The Huawei struggled with banding from the fluorescent lights and the Eclipse rendered everything way too cool and overexposed, the Xperia P did a good job with the scene, despite it being a little underexposed.

Indoor Flash Portrait

In all honesty, all 3 handsets performed quite poorly with this test. The Honor got the color balance completely wrong, the Eclipse just couldn’t focus to save its life and the Xperia P was noisy across the whole picture. The handset that won this round (or lost the least) was the Xperia P.

Outdoor Daylight

The “Flagship-High-End-Premium-Sexy-Phones” Group (Over RM2,000)

Indoor Fluorescent

Indoor Flash Portrait

With the Indoor Flash Portrait test, the SGS3 renders the afro a lot more true to life than the One X. This is a very important thing when shooting people as if you don’t render accurately, it will make them look way unhealthier than they actually are. Sharpness wise, it looks like the One X may have a slight edge but not very much. For this test, we’ll call it a win for the Samsung Galaxy S3. 

Outdoor Daylight

In our outdoors test which was meant to separate the 2 neck and neck flagship models, the final result proved more elusive than ever. While the One X rendered the color a little on the cool side, which is probably closer to the real scene, the SGS3 rendered warmer with more accurate contrast, albeit on a slightly more underexposed scale. In terms of sharpness however, this is where the SGS3 pulls ahead. Both on the centre focus point and the edges, it is noticeably sharper than the One X. This one goes to the SGS3.All in all, there is very little that separates the SGS3 and the One X on the camera front. The One X may have the faster lens, letting you take better quality low light pictures (with the skilled, steady hands prerequisite of course), the SGS3 offers more in terms of detail and overall sharpness. I’ll be honest with you, if you had to choose between these 2 phones, don’t do it based on the camera alone, there is just too little separating them. We didn’t go into the extras like burst mode and HDR but it will be covered in the individual reviews. If I had to pick, I would go for the SGS3 just for that extra sharpness. Color can be corrected, but sharpness is hard to do so on the handset itself.

Overall and Conclusion

So which camera impressed us the most? Given the price points and all things considered, it would have to be the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the Sony Xperia Sola. The quality and sharpness that the SGS3 produces is simply unmatched among its price point and throughout our 10 phones. For the Sola, it’s the value for money which makes it appearing. For less than a grand, you’ll get pretty decent results camera wise.

We hope you’ve found this relatively useful! Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment to find out which phone performs the best in our benchmark tests!

If you missed our previous parts, check them out here!

THE LYN GREAT BIG ANDROID PHONE SHOOTOUT: PART 1 – INTRODUCTION

THE LYN GREAT BIG ANDROID PHONE SHOOTOUT: PART 2 – USER INTERFACE

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