Droid Bionic Phone Camera

November 7th, 2011: The sample photos in this gallery were taken with the Motorola Droid Bionic camera. I’ve had the Droid Bionic for a month and a half now but decided to try out the camera in earnest over the weekend. I was never too impressed with the few snaps I had taken before but I didn’t really try to take decent shots either. After learning the camera a bit better I can say I’m not terribly impressed. I can get a good image but I have to work at it. The camera software seems buggy. The focus point will disappear sometimes after a shot and not reappear until you have taken another shot or switched modes. In macro mode in some cases it doesn’t want to focus on the subject electing to focus at infinity or somewhere way behind the subject. Shutter lag makes it nearly impossible to take a picture of anything that is moving including a flower that is blowing slightly in the wind. Picture quality isn’t too bad though. When there is lots of detail in the shot like leaves you can tell the resulting jpg’s are over sharpened. This is not so evident when you are shooting larger objects. There is, of course, significant noise but the NR routine seems to reduce the chrominance noise to a level I find acceptable. I’m not so opposed to luminance noise. I guess it appears somewhat similar to film grain. At higher ISO’s there is significant smudging of details due to the NR. I don’t consider the jpg’s useable straight out of the camera. All of the shots I took needed tweaking; color balance, tone curve mainly. Overall the Droid Bionic camera will work if I have nothing else with me or I am looking for a challenge. Otherwise I’ll grab a dedicated camera, more due to the buggyness of the camera software and lack of control than picture quality which is better than I expected as long as you post process. I processed the following shots using Nikon Capture NX to resize, crop, adjust tone curves, and color balance:

November 10th, 2011: After a little more time with the Bionic I have to say the pictures aren’t too bad for a phone camera. Macro mode in some cases is actually quite good. The things that need to be done to make this a good phone camera: 1. Fix the bugs (stalls and lockups when writing files, focus hunting, disappearing focus point); 2. Add a focus lock (it only has continuous focus mode now); 3. Add a few white balance presets so that color balance can be consistent shot to shot; 4. Add a manual ISO to give just a bit of manual control; 5. Options to reduce the in camera sharpening and noise reduction.

May 24, 2012: I updated the OS for the Bionic several months ago. Several fixes to the camera made it much more useable. The focus responsiveness is much better now and lockups are no longer an issue. Not a bad camera for a phone.