| Home > Best Rated Camera Phones |
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| Below are our best rated camera phones for 2009. If you are a camera phone enthusiast, you may want to consider these camera phones for your next cell phone purchase: |
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Samsung Memoir T929 |
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| In spite of a great feature set in general, the camera is the most outstanding feature of the Samsung Memoir. One of the earliest phones in the high-megapixel market to become available with a US carrier with a much more affordable price tag (approximately $270) than it's main European counterpart, namely the Samsung Innovo8 (priced at around $700). Sporting a 8MP camera, this sleek phone (or camera) has features that can stand up stand-alone point and shoot digital cameras! |
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| In terms of build, the "phone" really looks deceptively like a camera - and it's certainly not unintentional! The camera controls, namely shutter and zoom are positioned on top. The part of the phone that you would hold, that is, the part which your fingers would grip, are covered with faux leather, presumably for a better grip. Besides, the lens and flash are located where you would expect to find them on a regular camera - in fact, the mobile really looks like a camera but for the number pad! |
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| The phone includes a widget that lets you upload photographs to public image sharing services like photobucket and flickr with just one click, and without launching any applications. It even supports geotagging, if you would like to save your photo locations. The 8MP lens lets you take pictures of resolutions up to 3,264x2,448, and store them on a MicroSD card. The image quality is excellent. You can zoom in to up to 8X. Besides, there are 12 preset modes, and the rather unusual feature of panorama photography - you can take up to seven continuous shots from left to right or right to left and this little device will "stitch" them for you! The camera features "anti-shake" and blink and smile detection, which makes sure no photographs have blinking or unsmiling faces - and they work very well. |
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Sony Ericsson C905a |
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| How about packing all the goodness of a CyberShot digital camera in your mobile phone? The 8.1MP Sony Ericsson C905a does it for you! This little gadget packs in 16X zoom as well, which is four times the usual 4X zoom found on most camera phones. Even the flash is a xenon flash, brighter than the more commonly found LED flash. |
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| The D-pad has convenient camera-only shortcuts that become active only when the camera is on, letting you change settings without digging through a long list of (sub)menus. The camera is pretty speedy too, it focuses fast and saves even a 8MP picture in about a second. You can click away to get about one picture every five seconds or so, which is pretty good for a camera phone. The menu gives you many settings that you can tweak to your desire, and any decent photographer should be able to take photographs that are as good as a regular digital camera. |
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| For the price, it lives up to the hype and is great fun - it's straightforward to post images to social networking sites like facebook and twitter. There is pretty good image editing software on board too, so although photographs taken indoors may not be the best, you can make some basic corrections and pep it up easily, and quickly. You may prefer to invest in a Cybershot if that's all that you are looking for - but if a media player, a phone and on-the-go internet connectivity sound like good addons, you would want to seriously consider this one! |
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LG enV Touch VX11000 |
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| The LG enV Touch is the follow up to the widely appreciated Voyager model introduced a couple of years ago (rumors of a Voyager 2 died down giving way to the enV Touch). It's a fully touch sensitive camera phone sporting a WVGA light and proximity sensitive display. While the phone itself has numerous features, most notably the two 3" displays and a full QWERTY keypad, we'll get right down to the camera. |
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| The resolution of the camera is pretty good, at 3MP - as we've noted, it's probably all you'll need as long as you can get photographs at a 2048×1536 resolution. The MicroSD card slot is to the right of the phone (and fortunately does not require you to get the battery out to be used) and the camera button to the left. The camera comes with a bright LED flashlight, which can be designed to turn on automatically when there isn't enough natural light. The camera defaults to autofocus mode, although you could switch to macro for closeups or manual focus. |
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| A couple of nice addon features: panoramic stitching that guides you through the process of taking panoramic shots (these are a continuous bunch of shots that can be "stitched together" to capture a "wide" landscape in the absence of a wide angle lens), and smile detection, which snaps a picture of your friend only if he/she is smiling. An inbuilt image editor lets you do some basic adjustments to brightness and cropping. Also, if you are looking for more utility - beat this - you can grab a picture of a business card and the inbuilt Name Card Reader will use OCR to convert the text from the picture into actual data and add it to your list of contacts! |
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Samsung Behold T919 |
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| The Samsung Behold has a TouchWiz touchscreen interface, much like the Dare or Omnia. It's lack of Wifi and the full retail costs could be potential downers, but many would agree that the camera comes close to making up for it, being one of its better features. Its a 5MP lens equipped with a flash. |
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| It has all the usual controls - exposure metering, self-timer, adjustable ISO, and auto focus. There are six preset scenes to choose from. It can shoot at resolutions up to 2,560x1,920. The picture quality is sharp, although the flash isn't the most dazzling, so the indoor shots or shots in low light settings tend to be a little grainy. Also, there is some noise around the edges of the shots, but generally the colors come out very sharp and photos are easily transferred using bluetooth, a direct connection, or even a multimedia message. |
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| A small nit is that there is no option to silence the shutter sound. Other than that, a nice plus is the smile detection feature, and also a setting for taking back lit pictures. The videos don't come out nearly as well as the pictures do, but if that's not your priority, this is a yet another very good choice! |
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BlackBerry Curve 8900 |
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How much of a good camera do you expect on a smartphone like the BlackBerry? Well, hold your breath - the 8900 is packed with a 3.2MP lens and auto-focus capabilities. Also, the image stabilization comes in really handy when you click those pics. The pictures taken indoor turn out surprisingly clear - although the use of its LED flash does enhance the sharpness noticeably.
The digital zoom on the camera is only 2X and the auto focus needs around 3 seconds to get a handle on your subject, but these are only small nits, made up fully by the image quality and the accurate focus. This certainly excels as a mobile camera - and if a BlackBerry is your thing, the camera on this Curve is certainly superior to the one on the BlackBerry Bold. |
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