Sony Ericsson P900: Smartphone Extraordinaire! - Camera and Video
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The integrated digital camera takes both still and video clips and has many helpful features. Picture size goes up to and includes VGA 640 x 480 or smaller if preferred. There are several picture modes to hlep make the most of available light: automatic, indoor and outdoor. You use a menu to access picture size and quality settings, as well as full contrast, brightness and screen flicker settings (for taking pictures of monitors or televisions).
There is also a shortcut to the camera application on the side of the casing, so if something amusing happens, you don't need to mess around with the stylus; it's just a simple click to open the communicorder (as the camera application is known) and another click to take the picture. It even has a delay timer so that self-portraits can be sufficiently posed, or errant children gathered back into the family fray before the picture is taken. Overall, the quality of pictures taken is excellent, although it does lack a digital zoom so subjects more than about four metres away are tiny. Fortunately, pictures can be zoomed in upon once taken without losing too much quality or detail.
Once taken, pictures can be renamed, sent as attachments to messages or via one of the file transfer mediums (Bluetooth, etc) and can even receive some basic editing with the built in picture editor. Additionally, there is support for JPEG, BMP, animated GIF, PNG and WBMP file formats.
The video capture modes are also good. Video clips are recorded in mpeg4 at 176 x 144 and again have full options for brightness, contrast and quality. As mobile phone network operators often limit the size of picture or movie attachments in multimedia messages, the phone has a video message mode that records movies of up to the standard limit of 95kb, which gives you 11 seconds of high quality video. It's excellent and rare (although increasingly less so) that a mobile phone has the ability to record digital video clips, but unfortunately, those taken with the P900 can be blocky and of a fairly poor standard. In a fun setting this is more than adequate, but for professional use, stick to your HandyCam. Using a PC application (such as DVD shrink for example) to capture content of DVDs that you already own, then using one of several applications for creating mpeg4 or 3GP movie files means that you can condense entire movies to around 100MB, making them fit easily onto a memory stick. You can actually watch an entire movie on your phone!
A downside to the video aspects of the phone is that there is not a second lens on the front of the device to enable live video conferencing calls. It's only a minor issue at present, but as 3G phones become increasingly popular, I'm sure it's something that Sony-Ericsson will need to address at some point in the not too distant future.
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