I'm a photographer and like you, I wasn't impress with Droid X Pic quality before. Until I got the hang of it, knowing its limitation is the way to get better picture out of it.
One of the major cause of bad image quality is:
- the lens cover is dirty, (where the lens is placed is not ideal so you always get finger prints on it.) so I get in the habit of wiping the lens cover every day, and improves my pic quality tremendously;
- You want to tap on the screen to put the bracket in the area you want to focus on, remember to press shuttle half way to obtain focus. The bracket will show red if it could not correct focus, it would turn green when it achieve focus
- In my opinion, the lens is placed at an awkward position. That a lot of times your hand gets in the way. You have to train yourself to hold the camera the right way. Don't block anything in the lens (top part of the Droid X).
- Play with it more to find out the effective range of lens (there is always a sweet range of focal length that the picture comes out good, as for any lens) Standing too close or too far will give you bad shots. You have to play more to find out
- The limitation of Droid X camera:
- although it's got 8 Megapixel, like all cell phone lens because it's small sensor, it's not going to give you very sharp details when you look at things at a distance. Find that good range to take picture from.
- Zoom in appears to bring you closer to object, but it's digital zoom, won't get you any better image from far away because of physical limitation of lens.
Good things about Droid X Camera:
- under good usage (knowing limitation and adjust for it), under good lightning conditions, it takes incredibly sharp picture with great color accuracy (that is in terms of Cell phone cameras)
- Fairly fast to focus (considering it's a cell phone camera)
- It has a very good panoramic mode, if you haven't try it, it's awesome
- Although the flash is small, it's dual LED flash, that give you very good image quality if you're not too far from effective range.
- It has a mechanical shutter, you can actually see the shutter close or open if you look physically. What that means is that although small advantage, but should give you better image quality.