BlackBerry Pearl 8130 Cell Phone Review - Imaging

Cell Phone	BlackBerry Pearl 8130	Palm Centro	HTC Tilt
Score	4.27	1.41	4.80
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	980/450	581/596	1039/1057
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Sidekick LX	BlackBerry Curve 8320	Nokia N73
Score	2.55	5.25	3.98
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	782/662	1087/933	859.9/773.4
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

           

Cell Phone	BlackBerry Pearl 8130	Palm Centro	HTC Tilt
Score	5.13	8.08	5.50
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Sidekick LX	BlackBerry Curve 8320	Nokia N73
Score	4.00	4.92	5.88
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Live Preview (6.0)
The live preview on the Pearl is pretty good. It kept up with very rapid panning with only minimal blurring, even at lower light levels. There was minor pixelation, which wasn’t present in the final capture. Also, the opaque toolbars at the top and bottom waste screen space.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (6.33)
The Pearl took 3.19 seconds to take a picture after being in standby mode. This is faster than average, though not by very much. The phone comes out of standby very quickly, and the camera application begins to load without much lag. There is a slight lag between the appearance of the camera interface and the live preview, and once you’ve snapped a picture there’s also a bit more of a pause than we’ve seen on typical phones. The Pearl might not be the best phone for impulsive photographers, but it should suffice for most users.

Shot to Shot Time (0.90)
We knew as soon as we didn’t see a burst mode that the Pearl was in trouble, It took 14.9 seconds for us to snap a series of five pictures, and we’d already turned automatic save on and preview mode off. By our calculations, this is approximately 0.34 frames per second. Fortunately for the Pearl, however, none of the phones in the table below had a burst mode either. Phones with burst mode tend to get between one and two frames per second. Shot to shot time is very important for taking action shots, which the Pearl probably won’t excel at.

We arrived at our shot to shot time by taking five consecutive pictures of a timer. We start the timer the second we hit the shutter button. We get the total time for the test off the fifth and final capture.

Shutter to Shot Time (4.17)

The Pearl has a shutter to shot time of about 0.48 seconds. This is fairly slow, but relative to other smart phones it’s a quick-draw. Again, the Pearl isn’t ideal for spontaneous captures, but its camera is better than many competing ones.

Shutter to shot time refers to the delay between pressing the shutter button and the actual capture. To test this, we first aim the lens at our timer, then press the phone’s shutter key and the timer’s start button simultaneously. The captured image will show the total time the process took.

The interface for capturing stills is pretty straightforward, and will be familiar to BlackBerry users. The top contains a thin toolbar with the date and battery life. The bottom toolbar lets you know how many pictures you have left to take, the current zoom level, and the flash setting.
 

The menu key will bring up a slightly different set of options from other BlackBerry devices. The only two important choices are to go to the album or open op an options menu. In the options menu you can fiddle with the flash, chose a white balance preset, set picture size and quality, add a color effect, choose between external and internal memory, and set the folder pictures will be saved to. There are no options for full screen viewfinder mode. There is also no shortcut to video capture mode.

Once you've captured an image, it’s automatically saved, then the usual BlackBerry post-picture options appear. You can erase the picture, the crop “Set As” button, a “Send As” (email or MMS) button, and an option to rename the picture right then and there. We really wish BlackBerry would swallow their pride and make a new icon for their Set As button, because anyone familiar with image editing software will verify that the crop tool had it first.

Photo Album Software Internal (5.0)

        

The Pearl has BlackBerry’s usual album software, which is solid. The main window will display 2-5 thumbnails per row, as set by the user. When a picture is highlighted, its title and file size are displayed at the bottom. The Pearls can also perform basic slideshows. It will cycle through a folder’s contents at a user-determined interval from 1-15 seconds. Of course, the menu will also offer all the basic management options: renaming, copying, moving, deleting, sending, assigning to a contact, or setting as wallpaper.

Clicking an image will bring the picture up in view mode. While you can zoom or rotate the picture, these changes can’t be saved. The zoomed/rotated picture can be set as wallpaper though.

Manual Control (0.0)
There aren’t any options for true manual control, such as shutter speed or aperture settings.

Zoom (1.0)
The Pearl has digital zoom. Digital zoom is only worth a single point because in virtually every case you’re better off not using it. What happens when it’s used is the picture is enlarged and cropped, which can be done much more gracefully and accurately with even basic image editing software.

Focus (0.0)
The Pearl has a fixed-focus lens. This translates into faster image capturing than auto-focus lenses, but worse quality overall.

Flash (6.0)
The Pearl has a flash, which is atypical for phone cameras. Further, it’s an actual flash as opposed to an LED that just stays on when flash is enabled. The flash is only good for a close range picture; when you get more than four feet away, captures will look dark and muddy. Even so, the Pearl’s flash puts it head and shoulders other over camera phones.

Metering (0.0)
The Pearl doesn’t have metering options.

White Balance (4.0)
There are quite a few white balance presets available above and beyond the default automatic setting. The six presets are sunny, cloudy, night, indoor, incandescent, and fluorescent.

Image Handling (2.0)
The only image handling options available are renaming and resaving images. As mentioned in the album section, while you can zoom and rotate pictures while viewing them, you can’t save these changes.

Video

Overall Video Score (4.0)
One of the Pearl’s main upgrades is the ability to capture video. Unfortunately, the quality isn’t the best. The supporting options are pretty good, however. You can set capture resolution to normal (240x176) or MMS mode(176x144). There are white balance options as well. There is also a flash/flashlight you can turn on for night capturing.

Video Resolution (3.25)
The Pearl had a video resolution of 171 lw/ph horizontally, and 190 lw/ph vertically. This isn’t the best video capture we’ve seen, but at least now the feature exists in the BlackBerry universe. We’d recommend you keep your captured video to the small screen, as enlarging it any more will produce a rather messy result.

Video resolution is tested in much the same way as still resolution. We first take a video clip of our industry standard resolution chart. Then we pull out random frames and run them through Imatest. Again, Imatest will analyze the pictures and determine how many line widths per pixel height (lw/ph) the camera was able to discern. This means it basically counts the number of individual lines the camera could make out before it blurred the black and white into a patch of gray.

Cell Phone	lw/ph horizontal/vertical	Score
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	171/190	3.25
Palm Centro	249/274	6.82
HTC Tilt	183.2/177.3	3.25
Sidekick LX	N/A	0.0
BlackBerry Curve 8320	N/A	0.0
Nokia N73	272.4/224.8	6.13

Video Compression (2.0)
The Pearl can only capture 3GP video.

Interface (5.0)
The video capture interface is remarkably similar to the camera’s, even though it looks slightly different. The toolbars are still there, but the bottom one has no zoom option. It does have a timer that keeps track of the length of the capture. The options menu is more or less the same, with a few options removed. You can still set white balance and the folder your videos will be saved in. Resolution comes with two options, a normal (240x176) setting, or MMS mode(176x144). There is also an option to enable the video light, which will switch on the flash to help illuminate your subject. It can be set to on, off or automatic. Automatic will make use of the light sensor to dictate when it’s necessary.

Manual Control (0.0)
As with the camera, there are no manual control options available.

Zoom (0.0)
There aren’t any zoom options.

Modes (2.0)
There is exactly one mode available: MMS mode. This will help you optimize your captures for sending in a text message.

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