Outdoor photos from the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
I spent most of today at Six Flags Magic Mountain for the first day of my MID Moves tour. In between using the OQO Model 2+ and taking pictures with my Xperia X1’s 3.2-megapixel camera for some light mobile blogging, I used the X1 to take a few scenic shots of the theme park. Since I’ve already shown you how the phone’s camera performs for shooting products under CES indoor-lighting conditions, I thought it would be worthwhile to show you what it can do under natural light, outdoors on a Monday in California.
The photos were taken in VGA resolution and then resized to keep the file size down, so what you’re about to see is sort of at the lower end of the X1’s capabilities. The increased resolution doesn’t make that much of a difference after resizing, especially when viewed on the web, so you’re not missing out on a whole lot.
The photo quality is sufficient for blogs, I think, but you can tell they’re not from a “real” camera. Whereas the CES photos generally came out pretty good, particularly for a cameraphone, these outdoor shots are unimpressive. The colors are washed out and dull, fine details are missing, and the quality just isn’t very good. I actually think the iPhone’s camera does a better job outdoors.
My DSLR takes much nicer shots! ;-)
But: A camera in a mobile phone is a camera in a mobile phone and a DSLR is a DSLR.
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/17517/
The point is: good enough is good enough. Before, phone cameras were garbage. My HTC Diamond takes similar photos, good enough to leave a dedicated camera home. My Diamond also takes decent close-up photos/video (Macro mode), 30 mm, most dedicated cameras cannot do such near shots.
Again, the point is: with the latest HTC phones, built-in camera is for real. I believe this Xperia X1 is made by the same OEM with the same 3.2M camera.
Always take a photo at the highest resolution, then use a good utility such as PhotoResize to scale it down. This way you usually get better shots than direct 640×480.
I take pics at max res with my DSLR and point-and-shoot, but I’m using the lower res for the Xperia because whenever I try to email anything bigger, it takes too long to get sent or the messaging app times out. I wasn’t sure if I was going to email any of these pics to Flickr or post them directly to the MID Moves site, so I just stuck with VGA to be on the safe side.Thanks for the tip about PhotoResize. I’ll look into it. :-)