Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a look at the camera and camcorder application on the HTC hd2 in the for review that we posted a few days ago on pocketnow.com we talked about the photo and video quality which we decided was not too great although it's passable so in this video we're gonna look at these applications to show you what has changed and sort of how this camera application works and how fast it takes pictures because the Snapdragon processor really helps it snap pictures extremely fast so here we are right now we have sort of a background object in a foreground objection just to sort of a demonstration so let's first start off with taking pictures quickly so I'm gonna turn off the flash so we don't have to deal with that and I'm just gonna take a picture I'm not gonna really worry about how it's going to look on the screen and you can see how fast the camera application is on other HTC devices or other windows mobile devices it's really slow to get from the next to get from the point where you take a picture and you're an intake the next one takes about three seconds but not the case on this device so we have selective autofocus meaning I can tap the background to get that InFocus the foreground will get blurry or I can tap on the foreground to get the background kind of a little bit blurry we can change the flash mode over here we can have it going to fill light or automatic and let's go into fill light so you get an idea of sort of what photos look like with the flash because the flash is so extremely bright a lot of the time even if you are shooting from several feet away in an indoor situation the resulting picture just has too much light and that's thanks in part to this dual LED flash which I think doesn't really make much sense I think one LED would have been plenty of light to provide to a dark subject if you're taking pictures so the flash is kind of detrimental I think to the camera of the hd2 so let's go through some other settings what's kind of new about this device is that we have a zoom bar over here although this is using digital zoom which as most people know is kind of fake it doesn't actually mechanically move the lens in and out it just zooms in on the picture and the result is that if you take a picture that is zoomed in it will likely be a lot more blurry then if you were to take one zoomed out or I should say pixelated not necessarily blurry so let's zoom back out if we go into settings we have another way to switch between storage on the device or storage on the on the storage card included before you have to kind of dig into settings to change this but now it's quick quick and easy to sort of determine where you want the pictures to go of course we have the standard settings here like white balance we can change the white balance to automatic indoors outdoors that sort of thing there's a night mode we can change the brightness of the picture and let's go back we can change the ISO setting the self-timer if you want to kind of rest this on a on a shelf somewhere and take a family portrait or something like that we can go into advance and see all the settings here which are pretty common for HTC devices so we can change the resolution the highest resolution is 5 megapixels and right now it's set at that although we can go to three two and one megapixels and if you're trying to save on space you can always go to just the sort of almost VGA size so when I hit cancel and go back we can also decide if you want have a widescreen photo if not you'll see kind of the the letterbox or the the bar on the side I think it makes a lot more sense to have that nice widescreen view so I'm going to turn that back on touch focus on or off and we already demonstrated that selective autofocus you review duration and this is a way that you can get it to take pictures even faster so we can say no review and you can get the next picture ready to go even faster than that going down the list we've quality and you can change it from fine to super fine to basic moving on we can also turn on and off a timestamp if you want to remember when it was taken we can determine if we want to keep the backlight on or you can turn it off to save on battery life going forward you have the shutter sound if you want it to make a sound after you've taken the picture we can change the effects to have sort of grayscale you can kind of see on the side what that looks like sepia negative kind of some fun stuff there metering mode which I can't change due to the focus mode going over we have the counter which shows you how many pictures you've taken this this is helpful if you have a flash card so you can determine if you've taken the pictures are hundred pictures and you want to see how many you've actually taken Flickr adjustment it's always good to have that on auto so that it can determine if it needs to cut down on Flickr adjustment depending on what you're taking a picture of you can turn on and off a grid to help you align things on the screen and if we go to about we see this is version six point two six now let's switch modes to the camcorder mode to see kind of what settings we get there so here are the other camera modes and we can do a panorama and a contacts picture that'll go right to contacts which is great and here we are in video let's see the settings that we have here we can change the brightness again we do have one touch to change the storage option if we go into advanced we can change the resolution this will do up to VGA recording which is pretty good it's a it's above average for a smartphone but it's certainly not high definition we can change the review duration the capture format and we can switch between only two different formats we can change a recording limit if you don't want it to record for a very long time going over to the next side we have keep backlight on or off we can record with audio which is always good to have on again the shutter sound is there we can change the effect to the same three effects that we found previously there's a counter again and you get the point from there so just as a little test let's look at the video quality on this device I'm just going to do a little bit of a test and move things around so you can kind of get a feel for how good the camera is and we're not going to put the fill light on because that makes things look not so nice so we're gonna leave it on no fill light okay this is a test of the camera or the camcorder on the hd2 we're gonna move things around so we can get a test or a feel for how quickly how the frame rate is on this device when recording and here's an HTC pure alright let's stop it and see what that looks like play it's fine so the quality is pretty good it's not going to replace your HD camcorder that's for sure but if you're doing a quick video this definitely is capable of helping you out in that way so that was just a quick look at the camera application on the HTC hd2 the really fast processor helps to get from picture in a picture really quickly so there's really no weight but the quality of the photos could be better and perhaps a firmware upgrade will help with some of these issues the flash is way too bright and the pictures come out kind of grainy and the videos not too sharp but it works it's a it's not supposed to replace your camera and it does an okay job that's it for now