[XPERIA X10 General] Mano1982:
X900: 5MP Carl Zeiss camera fails to impress

The Nokia N900 comes with a 5 megapixel camera with a maximal image resolution of 2576 x 1936 pixels. A dual LED flash is supposed to assist is low-light capabilities but as you know its range is pretty limited so you shouldn't expect miracles.

The Carl Zeiss certification got us intrigued at first but as it turned out the camera of Nokia N900 is just another confirmation that the device isn't exactly meant to be a multimedia monster. Now don't get us wrong - it isn't too bad or anything but it is far from the best 5MP shooters.

The quite basic user interface was the first indication that got us thinking we should probably lower our expectations. The available settings include white balance, ISO sensitivity, flash mode and exposure compensation plus dedicated modes for portrait, macro, landscape and sports shooting.

The image quality is about average for a 5 megapixel shooter. The colors are good and the amount of resolved detail is very decent too. The image noise however is pretty high, especially in uniform areas like the blue sky. And it's been some time since we've last seen a similar kind of image processing. It's a bit immature as if coming from the early days of cameraphones.

The dynamic range is also average at best, but at least the contrast is decent.

X10: 8 megapixel camera

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 sports an 8 megapixel camera with LED flash capable of taking photos at a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels.

Sony Ericsson have designed their own camera interface from scratch and it takes us back to the golden days of Cybershot.

At the left viewfinder bar you will find five options - capturing mode, resolution, scenes, focus mode and camcorder switch. On the opposite you can set the exposure compensation and go to the camera album.

There are four capturing modes - normal, scene recognition, smile detection and touch capture. Scene recognition is essentially auto mode whereby the X10 will determine what setting to shoot in.

There are five focus modes available - single or multi autofocus for focusing on more than one spot, touch focus, macro mode, face detection and infinity for capturing landscapes.

Finally, there is one really handy addition - the recent shot tray. It appears at the bottom right corner and shows the last pictures taken as small thumbnails.

The camera interface puts a lot of options on the viewfinder so they’re a touch away (they can be hidden of course), but to get to the rest you need the extended settings menu. It includes options like geotagging, image stabilization, self-timer, even “smile level” to tweak the sensitivity of the smile detection.

A cool, iPhoto-like feature is the face recognition. Snap a photo of someone (it works with up to five faces in a photo) and their face will be tagged – automatically if you’ve already tagged that person, or you can do it manually if you haven’t or the automatic recognition fails for some reason.

After that’s done, when viewing a photo with you can tap the name tag, which brings the options to view the contact, show all photos with that contact, or change or delete the name tag. Viewing all photos for a contact is available through the contacts entry in the Contacts app as well.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 takes pretty good photos with excellent detail and colors. There are no visible problems with the lens or processing algorithm. There are some things here and there that need polishing, but we are more than satisfied with the results.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 takes pretty good photos with very low noise levels – the noise reduction algorithm does its job well and thanks to the 8MP sensor there’re plenty of pixels to work with.

The color rendering is good, the only thing to note is the X10 camera tends to leave the shadows slightly underdeveloped.

(Source: GSMarena)