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Palm Pre 2 review: Camera
Describing the camera options of the Palm Pre 2 can be achieved in a mere three words: There are none.
Okay, that's not quite true. There's geotagging of photos and you can have the flash set to Auto, On or Off.
The Extended Depth of Field technology is used in the Pre 2, as it was in the Pre Plus. This alternative to the occasionally clumsy autofocus you get in other camera phones analyses the detail in the captured image to produce a picture where nearly everything is detailed and in focus.
You might think a good amount of processing power would be needed to do all this, and you'd be right. Well isn't it handy that the Pre 2 boasts a shiny 1GHz processor, then?
As a result, it's capable of doing it all very quickly. The whole thing feels fairly snappy to use compared the shutter lag combined with slow processing you get on some camera phones.
We're used to seeing phones full of ways to change the white balance, exposure, scene settings, but is this simple system the way to go?
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EDOF: You can see the effects of EDoF well here, where no particular part of this plant is in focus compared to the rest. It's all reasonably well-defined, though there are parts that lack detail, and even look a little processed
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GREY: While this was taken on a grey, cloudy morning, there was more light than this! The camera really doesn't seem to be getting enough light onto the sensor, and there's almost no detail in any of the shadowy trees as a result
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INDOORS: With plenty of even light, this lion looks absolutely superb. The EDoF processor has given him perfect edges – to the point that he actually almost looks composited on, because the rest of the picture is a little blurry (those people make it look like it must have been quite a long exposure) and very noisy, especially in the background
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QUICK SNAP: We took this one in an intentional hurry, to see how EDoF coped with us having little time to steady the camera. The answer is: not so well. The colours are quite heavy, and don't really pop out brightly in the way they should. Everything on the carousel is a little hazy too, though the barriers at the front are nice and crisp (shame they aren't the subject)
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