M500 camera quality

[Guest musicvan]

The camera quality seems to let the M500 down and does not appear to live up to its 1.3MP spec. The C500 I had appeared to take a better quality picture even though it was a lower specification? I wondered if other people have the same view? The problem appears to be in lower light situations (ie indoors) where blue spots appear, but not always ( starting the camera again appears to resolve)? Do not use the camera that much but useful feature, hopefully the root cause is firmware and not hardware.

EDIT: Sorry seem to have entered topic twice, not sure how to delete one?

Edited July 30, 2005 by musicvan

[Guest zippy172]

Yup, I share exactly the same opinion of the camera indoors, not had much of a chance yet to use it outdoors... I struggle to comprehend how the camera software (quite possibly the actuall camera IC firmware) can interpolate BLUE dots into the equation when the surround pixels are anything but blue!!

That's the other thing that cheeses me off about jpeg compression. Take a perfectly WHITE GIF image, then convert it to JPEG - where the hell did all those other colours come from?

[Guest bleugh]

............more casualties of the megapixel races here

the number of megapixels is not an indication of picture quality, the overriding factor here is the lens

the lens in the phone, is frankly crap, and would probably struggle to resolve a 640 x 480 image well, letalone a 1280 x 960 image that it claims to be able to do

also, phones use cheap CMOS sensors, far inferior to CCD's as used in cameras

a good example of lens quality being everything is the panasonic FZ3 camera, this has a fantastic lens, and is only a 3.2 Megapixel camera, yet in tests, the lens resolves about 25% more information than slightly lower priced cameras with more megapixels!

i.e. this camera with just its 3 MP gives a crisper and better picture than other 4MP or ghigher cameras

actually, i think the camera in the M500 is pretty good, you need a lot of light for it to work, and it produces a slight colour cast, but thats easilly sorted, and i do like 'grainy' looking pictures

[Guest musicvan]

............more casualties of the megapixel races here

the number of megapixels is not an indication of picture quality, the overriding factor here is the lens

the lens in the phone, is frankly crap, and would probably struggle to resolve a 640 x 480 image well, letalone a 1280 x 960 image that it claims to be able to do

also, phones use cheap CMOS sensors, far inferior to CCD's as used in cameras

actually, i think the camera in the M500 is pretty good, you need a lot of light for it to work, and it produces a slight colour cast, but thats easilly sorted, and i do like 'grainy' looking pictures

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for the feedack. Totally agree about the MP and sensor, these things are made to a manufacturing cost goal, it was more about the difference in the displayed image and final picture compared with the C500 which did not have the "blue dot" problem, there was a grain displayed on the C500 under low light conditions but not the blue effect. Not too worry I have a Canon EOS300D SLR for "real" photos :) , but the M500 is a useful snapshot device and a bit easier to bring along, need to try some more outdoor pictures from the M500.

[Guest clacton crew]

I was thinking of upgrading to this phone from the spv c 500 but I wont a phone with a good camera and this has now put me off. Whats the best phone with the best camera?

[Guest dshaugney]

I'd recommend you buy yourself a decent digital camera if you want good quality. No phone camera is great. Even that new Sony Ericsson phone that has a 2mp camera has crap quality - i've had a chance to play with it. It's all about the optics and the sensor - and frankly no cmos camera phone (no matter how many mega pixels) will give high quality shots.

[Guest clacton crew]

OK but would any of these new phones be better at takeing pictures than the SPV C 500? If I was to buy a Digital Camera what cheap ones would you say are good for say around £100?

[Guest davidhoff]

I read a review today of the XCute DV1. This phone created the best pictures so far with his 3mpixel! An then you also got an video capture option of 640x480 with 30fps!! Hopefully there will be phones with this future and windows mobile on it next year!

Btw. the price of this phone was also shocking: €600,- :)

[Guest clacton crew]

I bet that will be around £400 with sim and network it dose not look like I will be geting this but how much do you think the Nokia N90s will be?

[Guest davidhoff]

I think about the same as the xcute dv1, if you look at the price of the 6680 or 6681 (simfree, between 500 and 525€ in the Netherlands). Don`t expect this phones before autum this year underneath this price!

I have seen a preview of n91 and I must say that I hate symbian but I love a 4gb hdd! I will wait on the samsung wmphone en hope that camera is about 2mpixel!

[Guest Afy]

You may get better results by adjusting the default camera settings:

go to Adjust, then:

contrast 5

brightness 6

saturation 3

hue 5

sharpness 3

then do this:

options

General

flicker adjustment 50 hz

This seems to cut out alot of the 'grain' Also as previously said you ideally need plenty of natural light for best results.

(settings were found on xda-developers, thanks to whoever worked these out)

[Guest Xenzo1990]

Ye, the camera things put me off a bit too, but when I think about everything else the m500 has, then it compensates for it I guess.