Quick Camera Review
A little background first.
I like capturing stuff mainly with my smartphone as it is small and easy to carry around with. I had a Redmi 1S and although it had a small 8 MP sensor, it performs very well and I can tweak its settings to make it spit out near RAW image properties (ie. very flat files) which I then post-process using Lightroom. I said i had it because last week I accidentally dropped it in the ocean.
Not wanting an expensive replacement, I got a Zenfone 2 551ML.
The performance is great. Can't say the same for the camera. While it can capture the colors pretty well, it suffers from very low dynamic range. I could only expose for either highs or lows most of the time. Lowering the contrast to the lowest setting recovers a bit of the shadows but still not as a great of an effect as in some phones (eg. Redmi 1S). I could use HDR mode but it applies this very prominent halo effect on shots. I'd rather get bracketing and process them in some HDR program later.
Burst shot mode is slow, even the turbo mode which gets images from the video feed could only get around 5fps. Details are lost due to some noise reduction algorithm that can't be removed even when set to -3. Speaking of which, I was expecting a more extreme curve in the negative numbers of the settings. Setting saturation to -3 should make the image black and white and setting noise reduction to -3 should remove ALL NR. I want more control. Sadly this is not the case.
Still, can't complain much at this price point. This is good enough for Social media purposes I guess.
A little background first.
I like capturing stuff mainly with my smartphone as it is small and easy to carry around with. I had a Redmi 1S and although it had a small 8 MP sensor, it performs very well and I can tweak its settings to make it spit out near RAW image properties (ie. very flat files) which I then post-process using Lightroom. I said i had it because last week I accidentally dropped it in the ocean.
Not wanting an expensive replacement, I got a Zenfone 2 551ML.
The performance is great. Can't say the same for the camera. While it can capture the colors pretty well, it suffers from very low dynamic range. I could only expose for either highs or lows most of the time. Lowering the contrast to the lowest setting recovers a bit of the shadows but still not as a great of an effect as in some phones (eg. Redmi 1S). I could use HDR mode but it applies this very prominent halo effect on shots. I'd rather get bracketing and process them in some HDR program later.
Burst shot mode is slow, even the turbo mode which gets images from the video feed could only get around 5fps. Details are lost due to some noise reduction algorithm that can't be removed even when set to -3. Speaking of which, I was expecting a more extreme curve in the negative numbers of the settings. Setting saturation to -3 should make the image black and white and setting noise reduction to -3 should remove ALL NR. I want more control. Sadly this is not the case.
Still, can't complain much at this price point. This is good enough for Social media purposes I guess.
![P_20150526_133206[1].jpg](https://androidcentral-data.community.forum/attachments/120/120801-fe5f95edbb6c841a8be4eba62e7beff5.jpg "P_20150526_133206[1].jpg")
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