Monster Video Test! 4K Video Samples from the LG G Flex on AT&T!
Review: The Kodak PIXPRO AZ522 camera with 52X Zoom
Back from the Chapter 11 ashes, JK Imaging is reviving the Kodak brand, and iterating quickly on a variety of different photography solutions.
The AZ522 is their flagship point and shoot, utilizing a crazy optical zoom. Is that long zoom enough to compete in a world of terrific smartphone cameras? Let’s take a look!
Related:
Photo Samples from the PIXPRO AZ522
The iPhone 5S in Action! Testing the Speakers and Camera of Apple’s Newest Phone!
I’m almost wrapped up with my full long term review of the 5S, but I thought I’d tease some of the videos we’ll be using to showcase the performance of Apple’s newest handset.
Starting off with the most comprehensive camera test you’ll find on this phone online, shooting in a variety of scenarios including bright outdoor scenes, low light, indoor, night time, tracking movement, and we played with slow motion video. If you’ve been curious to see how this new image sensor stacks up against Nokias and Androids, we have a ton of samples to show off!
Also, no discussion of a multimedia phone would be complete without some speaker tests. The iPhone is a svelte slab of phone. I was really curious to see if Apple could cram in a speaker which would be able to compete against recent outings from Nokia and HTC. I was very surprised by the results of our speaker test, and you can hear the iPhone playback movie clips and music in our video below.
Be on the lookout for our full long-term review in the coming days!
Nokia Quietly Releases “Refocus” Website – Lytro style focusing coming to Lumia Smartphones?
Details on this are pretty slim, but it could be an exciting development for mobile photography (pun intended).
For those who don’t know what Lytro is, it’s a special camera which takes photos that allow the photographer to select the focus point AFTER the image has been shot. Take a picture of a scene, and pick what to focus on later. It’s a really sci-fi approach to shooting stills.
It looks like Nokia might be replicating that functionality in a future app update on Lumia Smartphones. Dubbed “Refocus”, it provides similar focus-after-the-fact features, or the ability to make everything in focus. As I’m used to shooting on an SLR, there’s something a little mind blowing about having your entire frame in focus.
Nokia quietly released a website to show off some test pics. As this doesn’t rely on any specialty hardware, it could become a popular feature moving forward, especially when paired with the excellent image sensors built into the Lumia 1520 and 1020. Rumors point to this feature being included on Nokia’s up coming phablet, then filtering into a select number of older phones later through software updates.
Play with this photo below to see how Refocus will work, or hit the link under it to check out Nokia’s site.
The New Nokia Camera App for PureView Lumia Phones – Feature Walk Through on the Lumia 1020!
I’m super excited to see Nokia combine the features of the Pro Camera and Smart Camera apps for Lumia Windows Phones. While Lumia phones often feature impressive cameras with cool features, it was always frustrating having to remember which features were in one app and which were in a different app. Now we have one camera app to rule them all!
But seriously there are some incredibly photographic controls built into this new app, allowing users to control a myriad number of exposure settings. If the camera is the most important part of your smartphone experience, and you haven’t checked out a Lumia, you’re kind of missing out.
Let’s take a look through the new Nokia Camera app on the Nokia Lumia 1020!
Related:
Video samples from the Nokia Lumia 1020 – The best camera on a phone today.
Ask Juan: How useful are 41MP pics from the Lumia 1020 when uploading to Facebook, Instagram, etc?
Digital Bolex serves up more sample footage from the D16
The D16 is a throw back to the classic days of amazing 16mm film cameras. Hand cranks and pistol grips ruled the day, and many film makers got their start with these interchangeable lens systems. The Digital Bolex is a modern re-imagining of that classic camera utilizing a 2K digital sensor and the ability to shoot raw video. Designed to use any number of semi-pro and professional lenses and accessories, the D16 was a Kickstarter funded project, and now we’re just waiting for it to hit the market proper to play with.
Well, while we wait, the Digital Bolex folks like to tease us, and they’ve just released another round of test footage from their prototype after a recent calibration. It’s looking pretty good…
Review: Focal Camera App (Beta) for Android
I wont get into all the drama surrounding this app. For those curious, there’s a third party ROM team called CyanogeMod which just went corporate and is looking to improve how people might load the CyanogenMod custom ROM onto various smartphones. For a brief time, the Focal camera app BETA was baked into CyanogenMod, but was removed for stability reasons and issues with licensing. Focal Developer Guillaume Lesniak shared his perspective on his G+ page.
Anywho, now Focal is its own standalone app on Google Play, and while we’re definitely talking BETA here, it’s got serious potential to offer a unified high quality camera experience to all users regardless of what phone they might be using.
Focal borrows some of the aesthetic of the stock Android Nexus app. Your shutter control floats on top of the viewfinder, and menus are hidden by swiping gestures. A slide up from the left side of the screen (in portrait) brings up a scrolling menu where you can find a huge number of photographic controls. Sliding across the shutter button allows you to change between photos, videos, panorama, photoshere, and switching between the front and rear cameras.
The number of options at your command is pretty formidable. The basics are up front, toggling the flash, adjusting white balance, “Scene Mode” options (auto by default), and activating HDR options. Exposure controls and metering options help dial in brighter or darker pics, and in camera filters allow you to see what your shots will look like in black and white, sepia, and negative color space. Lastly color saturation and JPEG quality settings can help your shots retain more detail or achieve smaller file sizes.
What’s ingenious is how well laid out these options are. They aren’t anything you wont find on another manufacturer camera app, like on the HTC One or GS4 for example. They are laid out in a very straightforward way here however. Tapping on one category provides the user a pop up with icons and text to explain what options they have for controls. That pop up remains until the user taps on the category again to collapse the options. Every control is found in this interface. Not like on other apps where some options are found on screen and some are buried under a separate menu. It really is the most intuitive layout I’ve seen on a camera app featuring this much control.
The interface is smooth, but performance is very shaky on several phones. Taking a pic froze my HTC One. The GS4 was able to utilize most features, but rendering a PhotoSphere locked it up. The LG Optimus G Pro was the most stable, but would default to the lowest resolution output for pics.
As for output, it’s hard to see much difference between the various phone apps and Focal. Using Focal’s quality settings, you can dial up jpegs almost twice as large as what you would normally see out of a phone app. The biggest I saw was a 5MB image off the LG. Usually your phone’s camera app will pump out around a 2MB pic.
So the verdict? Not read for your main driver. It is called a BETA, and that label is accurate. What we see is some pretty terrific potential though. For the number of phones I get to play with, there’s something nice about some consistency. For my personal phones now I tend to fall back on the same apps and launchers so I know where everything is by muscle memory regardless of what phone or tablet I use.
Adding a consistent camera experience would be a nice addition to the list.