Well, I put my £500 down and got me a Samsung Galaxy SII, my new mobile with more power (on paper) than my last laptop. So what does a 1.2Ghz Dual Core phone with 1Gb of RAM do when coupled with a 8 Megapixel camera that can record video 30fps at 1080p? The answer is not bad at all.
At the end of the day, a phone camera is unlikely to be better than a dedicated camera, but the SII pulls it off rather well. It’s a nice (if a little windy) day in Leeds today, so I took my phone for a walk to Temple Newsam Park.
Here’s the first 1080p sample, with me walking on an uneven grass surface:
Ignoring the audio (which sounds like a mixture of strong winds and audio leaking from my headphones), the video is not bad, the phone doing quite well considering I’m walking, bobbing up and down and so on. There’s a little hint of ‘rolling shutter’, but nothing major.
Video number 2 was taken to the side of Temple Newsam House. For comparison, there’s also a version of this video taken from my iPod Touch (recording at 720p – unfair I know but the final video is at 720p for both)
The final video was taken in the gardens, here I was trying to see how the colours would come out in both videos, but to give the iPod Touch a chance I dropped the recording quality on the Galaxy down to 720p:
One of the problems with AMOLED screens in the past has been their poor visibility in sunlight. Samsung appear to have improved this with their SuperAMOLED screen in the SII (with Auto Brightness switched on it does a good enough job). To improve things further whilst taking photos and the like, there is an ‘Outdoor Visibility’ option, which cranks the brightness up to the max, and ups the contrast of the display (the resultant photos and videos however are unaffected). The image you get on screen is of course, overly saturated and bright, but is highly visible even in direct sunlight.
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