Cameras Compared — Droid, Pre, iPhone
I am working in a Panera Bread today and I feel like one of those shady street counterfeit product hawkers. I have the original iPhone, Droid and a Palm Pre on the table in front of me, attracting a lot of attention. I have been comparing the three phones and I thought it made sense to shoot a simple “grab and shoot” picture using all three phones for comparison.
I am no professional photographer, and while I’m sure I could have tweaked the settings on each of the phone cameras, I wanted to simulate the way most people use their camera phone. You see something interesting, grab the phone and snap a pic. That’s all I did here, so each of the photos reflects the default settings for each camera. The photos were taken one after the other, and the camera was the same distance from the subject in each. Here are the three photos taken and some that show the sizes of the three phones:
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- Shot with Pre
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- Shot with iPhone 3G
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- Shot with Droid
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- Droid, iPhone 3G
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- Droid, Palm Pre
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- Pre, iPhone 3G
Seems like the Droid has no/poor autofocus?
The autofocus on the Droid is broken. There’s banding too. It’s suppose to be fixed with the Dec 11 patch. I’ve been having some success with turning off autofocus, but the images still come out fuzzy half the time.
Could someone tell me a situation where the auto-focus almost never works?
I’ve been surprised by the fact I don’t seem to have the auto-focus problems that have been described in the “first-look” Droid reviews.
My photos seem to be consistently in focus. What am I doing right?
The pre has the better of the close ups holding the phones. The iphone better of the 3 of the laptop. Not so sure about the droid?
The Droid clearly has the resolution, but that focus is unacceptable obviously. Even if you zoom the pictures until they are about the same size (easy enough in Opera anyway, ctrl+mouse scroll button) the Droid shot looks worse than the far lower res iPhone shot.
For some reason the pics with you and the phones makes me think you are doing a magic trick. Pick a phone any phone…
The iPhone looks by far the best, even though it is supposed to be inferior hardware lens. Just shows how much software influences final results. Hopefully the Droid can fix their crappy output with a firmware patch. I have heard the Droid VIDEOS are pretty good though. Man JK you are living in phone heaven having the top three in your pocket (envy).
Could you also share some other shooting details. How fast does the cam app start? For comparring its snapping capabilities its essential to compare the time it takes from pulling the camera out of your pocket to the actual picture. And for practical day to day use, is it easy to share a pic by various data means?
could you do a serious camera testing? (conforming to standards found in camera magazines) …i can’t see any sense in this playing around but passing some author’s sparetime
Any of them are a lot better than we had even a year ago.