Until recently I had never used/operated a camera phone, that is due to my present location. I am in a academic environment and we get to see only the phone-only-mobile. When I see some one on the streets using a camera phone, I always wish to stop them and enquire about the quality and features of their phones.
Only a week ago did I actually get to operate a camera phone. It was with a friend who visited me at my college and he has the camera mobile SGH X600.
Each time I see the ad of Samsung SGH X600 in India Today, I always knew that it is a real cool mobile with camera. And now I was seeing this cool mobile with this friend. So I started enquiring about all the features of the phone. And this review is from what he has said, and what I have observed about the mobile.
Price: It come for anything between Rs.10500-11000, depending on the bargain capability of the person and the city. I remember days when a camera phone costed more than Rs.15, 000/- Ofcourse, in addition to the basic cost of the mobile, you need to shell out Rs.2000 or so if you want to buy the cord to transfer the pictures from your mobile to the computer via the USB port.
Since this friend had a laptop, he could transfer the pictures directly through infra-red (IR) interface or whatever. And thus he didn’t have to spend 2000 bucks on the USB interface cord. Ofcourse he was able to transfer the pictures only in window2000 after he installed some software. At the time he met me, he was not able to transfer pictures to Linux.
Phone: The quality of reception is quite good. And the phone itself looks very cute. Browsing around is also easy. The antenna which protrudes out also adds to the look. Though it may not be very convenient, I personally like the look of mobiles with protruding antennas. The flash isn’t very good. The color screen is quite good. Haven;t checked the screensavers, wallpapers etc, but am sure that they must be good. The mobile has GPRS support and has polyphonic ringtones
Taking pictures: it was very easy. Just by a few presses, you could go to the take a picture section. The 180 degrees rotating camera is too good. With this feature you could take pictures of yourself too. There is a 4x zoom too. You just point the camera to the object and wait fora fraction of second, before it does auto-focus. You can also zoom and then ’’click’’... you have the picture. There is a flash that is no good.
Resolution: A wide range of resolution is possible. My friend said that the camera gives 600 x 400 pictures of very good quality. (I hadn’t seen the pics yet). So we went around the campus taking pictures of the various buildings and ourselves with the resolution set to the maximum supported value. We took pictures under all type of lighting conditions, on the road in mid-day, in the room, in the evening under street lights etc.
Storage: The mobile has a memory of 9MB, and since by default the pictures are in .jpg format, they are as small as 40KB or so. So you can take many pictures. In addition you can take 15 continuous frame and get a video.
Uploading: Finally at the end of the day, my friend simply uploaded the snaps using IR to his laptop.
Result: The pictures with 600 x 400 resolution we too blurred. There were some pictures of 60 x 40 or so which were of good quality, but in them you cannot identify whos who. Actually the mobile is taking pictures of 60x40 and expanding them to 600x400 and hence such a poor quality.
My friend says that other phones give even poorer quality pictures.
Conclusion: This finally made one thing clear, it is always better not to go for an integrated stuff and have a separate camera. Instead of spending 10, 500 on a mobile, one can spend 4000 on a mobile and remaining 6000 on a basic digital camera.