Dell Venue 8 7000 review

TechRadar's for-your-own-good recommendation is that you shouldn't obnoxiously use your big ol' tablet to take photos. The results aren't nearly as good as the pictures taken by your smartphone and, simply put, you just end up looking ridiculous. While Dell goes out of its way to make the cameras here special, we stand by our principle.

What's so different? Dell Venue 8 7000 has not two, not three, but four cameras inside of its 6mm thin frame. It's the first tablet to take advantage of Intel's RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera technology, which captures depth information using a combination of the rear-facing 8-megapixel camera and two adjacent 720p shooters.

The pair of stereoscopic 720p cameras, separated by 3.14 inches (80mm), are supposed to mimic how our eyes perspective a scene with left and right depth images. The formula creates a Z pixel for every X and Y pixel in a photograph, according to the engineers at Dell.

That translates into photographs that are no longer flat, at least in data form. They're not for 3D viewing on the tablet, but post-production editing techniques, like switching up the focus and changing the background color within the Dell Gallery app.

I was able snap a depth picture of a runner along the beach and isolate him while applying a selective black and white filter to the restaurant in the background. Other depth filters included brightness, contrast, saturation and punch. Likewise, I could add more emphasis to a specific subject by altering the focus at a specific depth.

Measuring objects within depth pictures was another strange but ultimately neat gimmick that came from Intel RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera technology. I was able to photograph a McDonald's sign along California's Pacific Coast Highway and get its rough dimensions of 8 feet tall by 6 feet wide, a task that would normally be out of reach of my tape measure.

Taking a photo of a Pringles can revealed its petite size, and then my room's 120-inch world map on the wall proved to provide an accurate measurement too. It's not always reliable enough to use professionally, which a neat party trick nonetheless.

Not all photos lend themselves to to the perks of depth editing. Subjects at the center of a picture often shared the same plane as those in periphery, or unintentional photobombers. They ended up being colorized or in focus too. Worse, the Dell Gallery app saved photo edits that I felt didn't work out directly on top of the original picture. It didn't help that the save button is in the top left corner, where I instinctively expected a back button.

Also out of place are all four cameras within the Dell Venue 8 7000. I often found my fingers overtop of the bottom and center located 8-megapixel camera and have to adjust - only to be covering at least one of the 720p cameras after choking up. The oddly-placed front-facing 2MP camera suffered the same fate in the bottom left corner of the tablets chin.

Aside from so-so depth sensing technology and poor camera placement, it didn't help that the image results didn't compare to those of other tablets. Apple's camera-leading iPad Air 2 with its one rear-facing snapper trumped all three of Dell's stereoscopic cameras. The Nexus 9 with a flash and even older Nexus 7 2013 also less blurry main and selfie camera photos.