How can two different 2.0 megapixel camera be so different
 

Just got my touch a few days ago. So far its been beautiful. There is one thing I dont understand. I checked my friends iPhone and took some pictures with it and than I took some pictures with my Touch. The results upset me. Here I was bragging to him that my phone can do anything his can do plus so much more. But when I looked at his pictures and compared them to mine, he laughed at me. Both are 2 Megapixel cameras and yet his takes beautiful shots while the Touch looks like a picture from a flip phone that hit the streets two years ago. Dont get me wrong I love the touch, but what gives. Could HTC be using cheap camera? Is there any tricks or registry hacks that I dont know about? If there is please let me know.

Sorry, please move this thread to the Touch section

The lens makes a big difference in picture quality. The pictures taken from the Mogul are supposedly better quality than those of the Touch as well. In an attempt to make the Touch as slim as possible, they might have needed to sacrifice some picture quality.

The iPhone camera is manufactured by Micron Technology, HTC uses Omnivision CMOS cameras. IMO the major difference is in the time and expense put into developing drivers. The Touch was a rush job to beat Apple to market and judging from this Kaiser/Tilt petition, HTC seems on a roll when it comes to sacrificing quality for the sake of getting products to shipping. Microsoft is rubbing off on them? :???:

it's the lens. The sensor on all these phones cost $10 or so. The "optics" is another $10. My guess is apple splurged and spent $30 on their optics.

I wonder if you can mod the phone and install a new camera.. hmm a project to look into.


for now be sure to take your photos in areas directly illuminated by sunlight.


giving you a better f.stop, s/s ratio.

even the common house hold light bulb isnt enough to push past 1/30 s/s

so unless you are outside, from 11am - 5pm, your photos will come out blurry, grainy, and low quality.

Have you at least checked all the settings and played around with them, or tried the shareware version of cool camera?

I have a 6700 and while I'm not blown away by the pic quality it is decent once the settings are set to the highest quality, and cool camera seems to step up the quality another 5-10%....

Yeah, the lens is the problem. Megapixels don't mean jack when the rest of the camera sucks. I wouldn't say "my phone can do everything yours can" really, because honestly, the iPhone is better as a touch phone than the Touch is. It just has crappy EDGE data, a bad keyboard, and no 3rd party app support. 3 things I couldn't live with. Next time, just tell him your 20-key XT9 keyboard, EVDO speeds up to 2mbit, and ability to add a plethora of applications to your phone makes it better than his. :D

I've played with every setting and nothing seems to work. Also was it not in one of these threads that compared the mogul to the touch and most said that the touch has slightly better quality for the camera. I guess with all the Iphone themes, Iphone dialers, Iphone Slide to start, Iphone everything, we are constantly trying to make our phone into what everyone know is a superior phone. If you are a manufacture that is going to try to duplicate a competitor cant you yet least come close.

my cam looks good and takes good pix i think better then then the mogul

The first picture is a shot of my wet dog taken with Mogul under ideal lighting conditions and with the phone resting on a cooler (no shaking). The second photo was taken with an iPhone posted on this blog. I find the color depth and level of detail better with the iPhone. I'll bet the person taking the shot had the phone in hand too. Don't even try going for quality shots with Mogul in hand :)

http://www.earthgenie.com/ppc/mogul_shot.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1319/...85b4346942.jpg

Really? You prefer the blown highlights of the iphone?

if ideal or perfect light conditions are a reqirement for a htc camera than that ashame because most of the time you cant have ideal conditions. When my buddy took pictures at the same time I did, the light was a little dim but clearly his lense was able to handle it and mine was not

No matter. A $100 7MP p&s the size of a credit card will wipe the floor with both the iphone and any HTC $20 camera glued onto a phone. I don't expect it to work well, it doesn't... it works, sorta, so in a pinch I can take a shot of something - which is fine.

If you want a better camera on your cell phone, your cell phone is going to have to cost about $100 more.

but you would think with a retail of 500 bucks that you could get a camera that takes better pictures than my sister can draw

I've taken pictures side by side with the iphone/mogul/touch. The HTC's are all washed out with iffy coloring. It needs near perfect lighting.

What a piece of junk.

who really expects quality from camera phones???


my Canon Powershot shits on 'dem all.




PS: Again, Apple always puts quality hardware on their devices... I hate to say it. Thats why they have a phone with a fast ass processor and one of the best touch screens. Now we can add the camera to that list. Too bad I can't say the samething about their apps.

No, you would not. Because you'd know that the camera is about $20 retail worth of material. Go to walmart and buy one of those "kid friendly" $20 digital cameras. Take some shots. Compare them. Notice they are the same as the ones from the mogul. Note that with about 10 seconds of post processing, you can make them look like the pictures from an iPhone.

When you see camera phones with actual digital camera lenses on them, then you can raise your hopes a bit.

or AT&T =P

what kind of post processing

Looks like they punched up the color curves, set whitepoint correctly, and applied unsharp mask to make it look sharper and more "vibrant". Pretty standard digital imaging stuff.

Note this is off the scaled 640x480 shot, if we had the fullsized image it would look better

For a phone that retails for more than 400 bucks, I sure would like quality parts. Anyone could carry a free phone with contract but when you pay hard earned money for something that advertises 2.0 megapixel and it looks like crap, I have a problem with that.

remember here guys the cost of the Touch is substantially less than the iPhone so it's not like they went chincy on the phone.

^ I Phone is is $399 right now.

Mogul has worst video quality...

My HTC Touch camera takes great Pix !! much better than the Cheap Mogul I used to have :)

Theres a video camera hack for the mogul that works for the Touch. I did it and works very well and now i get excellent vids. The hack allows you to recors are hiher resolution. Search in XDA forums. I would provide the link but I am at work.

You know, this really is starting to get silly.

The 1-2-5-8-1000megapixels part is almost irrelevant. Two things matter in photography: Size of imaging receptor (be it film or sensor) and Quality of optics. There is a reason why a pro lens costs $10,000, and its all about the glass.

A $5 plastic "lens" isn't going to cut it. Coupled with a 1mm "2MP" sensor that can barely be seen with the human eye, and you got yourself all the fixens for some really horrible images.

Believe me, on a "$400" pda/phone, the total hardware budget is, at best, a bit over $100. You are not going to dedicate a great portion of that budget to the camera you glue on the back. You'll get the cheapest sensor you can that says "2MP" or whatever the checkbox requires, and then you'll slap a 2mm plastic lens on it, and ship it.

I believe the guesstimate on the iPhone hardware cost was under $200. Something like $180? If so, they might have spent twice as much ($30? $40?) on the hardware for their camera. Mostly in a better lens, would be my guess, and perhaps a slightly larger sensor size.

Anyway, don't worry, be happy. And don't expect great pictures... heck my Nikon D70 DSLR only has 6MP, but thanks to the overall quality and optics, it takes way better photos then an 8MP $100 Point and Shoot. Which you would expect ;)

Christ, I wish I could buy a phone with a damn camera in it! It's sometimes handy for a nice quick snap but I've never expected anything more than garbage out of any camera on a phone I've ever had.

most of the camera phone use CMOS lense, and most of the digital camera use CCD
2 megapixel CMOS is NOT = 2 megapixel CCD....

I have thousands of dollars of digital cameras and lenses. When I really want photos I go with those. When I want snapshots, the Touch does just fine. I got a few very nice shots up close at the Zappa concert the other night and a few blurry ones too! One simple tip: hold the camera VERY still until after the sensor has completely activated. In the end, its really just a inexpensive add-on to a pretty full featured phone/pda.

Maybe I'm shooting the pics wrong, but the Touch's camera sucks compared to the Mogul's camera. Especially in low light. It's not even a close contest. And the Mogul's camera is not particularly mind blowing either.

i couldn't find it man.....would u mind post the link here?
thanks.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...ghlight=camera
is this the one you were talking about??

The Touch camera has piss poor low light performance. No matter how still you hold it won't compensate for the excessive gain that causes a lot of noise and vertical banding.

Only way to get around it is to do minus exp and turn on more lights, but the picture will be very dark.

The Mogul's camera was more sensitive. Not a stellar camera by any means, but certainly alot better than the Touch's craptacular camera.

But yeah, pics taken on the Touch are good for utility use. If I want beautiful pics, I'll use my multi thousand $$$$ Nikon DSLR setup. But most webcams take much better pics than the Touch.

Of course, The rest of the phone is better than the Mogul, but I'll say that the Mogul wins hands down compared to the Touch in the camera dept.

i NOTICE THAT THE mOGUL TAKES WAY CLEAR PICTURE than my Touch. I did some test shots with both phones and the mOGULS CAMERA BEATS THE tOUCH HANDS DOWN. Only way you can get OK pics with the touch is if you really hold the cam steady. Otherwise you just add more blurriness to the already out of focus pic. Sad, bu I like everything else on it. :)

Not to sound like a pest or anything but I understand that your SLR cameras take great pictures. I understand that the little click and shoot take better pictures, and even web cameras take better pictures. But unfortunatly I dont carry my SLR, point and shoot or even web camera with me all the time. What I do carry all the time is my $400 dollar sprint touch that claimed 2.0 megapixel camera. I know not all hardware are created equal but my wifes samsung upstage sometimes takes better pictures. I cant even put our camera in the same catagory as the iphone camera. By the way I had the Mogul for about three months and image quality on the Mogul is just as crappy as the touch.

I can attest to these general sentiments. I recently performed a camera test between my touch and mogul. I took at least 10 identical shots with each and organized them on my laptop. The mogul camera blow the touch to pieces. Much sharper and richer pics as well as better low light performance. Funny thing I never used my mogul for taking pic as it didn't meet my expectations for a 2 meg camera. I had to use it since it was all i had at amonday night game and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Recently I took some pics of my son in the mall and was equally impressed. Now the mogul camera has me considering if I should keep the touch. I will be keeping the touch though since I have a 7 meg Canon SD 750. If the mogul only had more Ram and working bluetooth........ ](*,)

I took 5 identical pics with a mogul and a Touch. I manualy configured both for optimun lighting. And no matter what i did, the touch pictures just dont come out as sharp as the moguls. As for the colors, i Managed to get the touch to take richer colors and more accurate than the mogul. So in a nutshell, mogul takes sharper pics but touch takes more richer and accurate colors.

I didn't mean to say that the Touch takes great pics. It doesn't, obviously. What I meant to say was that I personally don't care. I don't even remember that the Touch or the Mogul I used to have or the 6700 before that even have a camera until I'm at a concert or something where I can't bring the SLR. Then I whip it out, take a couple of crappy pictures and a little video. Oh, I have a complete recording studio too and I have to say the the mic on the Touch is the worst I have. Wish it was better, don't much care that it isn't because my expectations are very low for cameras on cell phones.