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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 24 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Don't give up on the camera"
Pros: Good telephone and fair camera
Cons: Camra requires finetuning by user
Summary: Out of the box, my new Samsung SCH-a970 took very poor pictures. Poor is of course a relative term. I was comparing the phone's camera to my somewhat dated little Sony (4 years old) which also has 2 MP but takes gorgeous pictures.
But if you change some of this camera-phone's settings you might be pleasantly surprised. I will list all menu settings further down.
First of all, start the camera and go to OPTION - SETTINGS and set Auto Focus to OFF. This simple step seems to improve the picture quality very noticably.
I am theorizing that with Auto Focus OFF, the lens behaves like a fixed focus lens but one with very great depth of field. In my trial it gave sharp focus from infinity right town to about 16 inches.
Turning Auto Focus OFF also shortens the delay considerably when I press the shutter release. This is a welcome bonus.
The user manual is of no help because it does not tell us what the various settings do to the shutter, aperature, sensor etc.
Setting the Picture Mode to Sports and Metering to Center also seems to help.
I am again guessing at the reason. Maybe the Sports setting opens the aperature a bit and thereby forces a higher shutter speed. After all, most sports entail rapid movement and call for short exposure time.
Setting the Metering to Center helps too, especially outdoors because when Metering is set to Average, the bright sky tends to cause underexposure of the subject.
Here now are the menu settings that seem to work best for me: Picture Mode=Sports, Flash=off, Quality=Fine, Resolution=1280 x 960, Brightness=0, White Balance=Auto, Color Effect=Normal, Metering=Center, Settings/Auto Focus=Off. This last one seams to be the most important change from the factory pre-sets.
- 2 replies to this review
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Wow! I became a member of Cnet just to thank you for giving such valuable info. I believe that your ideas will probably help lots of people achieve better results of pictures. Thanks soooo MUCH!!! I am even going to print out as I plan on getting phone for daughter for Christmas. Your suggestions on how to fix problems concur with PC mag. take on what are the cause of blurred pictures. Samsung should hire you! Thanks to you, I will buy. Thanks again!!! God Bless!!
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This phone's camera does indeed deliver sharper pictures with autofocus turned off and relying on its huge depth of field. But having said that, I hasten to add that you need to turn aoutfocus ON if you want to use the zoom feature. Otherwise the pictures will be out of focus.
Zoomed in on a subject, I would have expected the lens to behave like other telephoto lenses, which given their longer focal length, have far less depth of field and need to be focused when the subject is close. But this camera, when in full zoom, delivers a sharp picture only close up at about 10 inches. This is great for macro photography because the images are extremely sharp, but not suitable for more distant subjects. Evidently the lens does not behave like conventional lenses when its focal lenght is increased.
I have not had good results setting the camera to MACRO which is also a menu option and would be interested to know the rsults of other people's experimentations with this.
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