News - Nokia 808 PureView image quality comparisons

[crossy]

But the survey doesn't support that at all. They tallied ONLY the posts stating which set of photos were the "best". There's no ranking by preference here. So 6% thought the iphone was best, 4% thought the Samsung was best. That's got to be well within margin of error for a survey like this.

I'm not going to disagree about the nature of the survey - yes the results ARE close, and when looked at in plain percentage terms, they're insignificant. However, the SIII's camera IS being touted as "best of breed" in various places, in which case I would have at least expected it to pull out a lead over the iPhone.

Disregarding the survey, valid or otherwise, in the tests I've done my new SIII doesn't fare particularly well against the two-year old Sony Xperia X10 that it replaced. Whilst I'll be the first to admit that I've not tried all the modes, white-balance, etc - the tests that I have done (mainly indoors because the weather's been atrocious) seem to show that florescent lighting especially gives you over-saturated, over-compressed results more akin to a bargain bucket digicam rather than a very expensive "latest thing" smartphone. I'm hoping that this is solely a software issue, in which case perhaps there'll be a fix forthcoming.

Like I said, overall I'm impressed with the SIII - it does a very high percentage of things asked of it very well, which makes the poor pictures a bit annoying. That said, I've also seen discussion that the One X's camera is quite good.

With hindsight, it's just struck me as a bit weird that I'm getting even slightly bothered by this - after all, even the best smartphone is a compromise and for anything decent you'd be better off with a "proper" digicam.

[Barkotron]

Disregarding the survey, valid or otherwise, in the tests I've done my new SIII doesn't fare particularly well against the two-year old Sony Xperia X10 that it replaced. Whilst I'll be the first to admit that I've not tried all the modes, white-balance, etc - the tests that I have done (mainly indoors because the weather's been atrocious) seem to show that florescent lighting especially gives you over-saturated, over-compressed results more akin to a bargain bucket digicam rather than a very expensive "latest thing" smartphone. I'm hoping that this is solely a software issue, in which case perhaps there'll be a fix forthcoming.

Interesting - I'm going to need to see if I can nick my wife's S3 and have a proper look at the photos. I can't say anything to flourescent lighting, but we've used it on a few days out (honestly, I can remember seeing some blue sky and everything :S) and found the photos pretty good. Can't say I've looked at the individual pixels particularly, but going by the full-size crops I've seen on various reviews, I don't see that much to complain about.

The HTC is a funny one - I've seen a lot of reviews saying the camera is excellent as well, but all the crops I've seen have been horrendous. Truly horrible over-sharpened messes. The ones on GSMArena, and also the ones here (http://asia.cnet.com/camera-shootout...s-62216507.htm) show just how bad it gets.

[EDIT]P.S. My take on the survey though, is that out of 900-odd people, 800 or so can recognise the best photos (Olympus/808 are near enough that it's a matter of taste), and about 100 are idiots. I cannot see a genuine reason why anyone can claim the iphone/S3 shots are better than the Olympus/808 ones.[/EDIT]