Home > Reviews > Manufacturer > Samsung Blackjack II Cell Phone Review

Samsung Blackjack II Cell Phone Review - Imaging

Alfredo Padilla Published on December 31, 2007 Comment on this

Intro Making/Receiving Calls Software Other Features

Tour & Design Messaging Battery Life Value & Comparisons

Audio Quality Organizer Connectivity Conclusion

Imaging Multimedia Hardware Ratings & Specs

Resolution (2.45)
To test the resolution of photos taken by a phone's camera we take a series of photos of an industry standard resolution chart. We then use Imatest to analyze these photos. Imatest produces a score called line widths per pixel height (lw/ph), which measures how many alternating white and black lines can be discerned before they start blurring together.
The Blackjack II's two megapixel camera scored 742 lw/ph horizontal and 894 lw/ph vertical. This is not a particularly impressive score. You can see from the comparison table below that although two of our comparison phones did slightly worse than the Blackjack II, three of them did significantly better. Of particular note are the iPhone and Curve 8320, both of whom also have fixed focus two megapixel cameras, which did much better on this test than the Blackjack II.

Cell Phone	Blackjack II	Nokia N81 8GB	BlackBerry Curve 8320
Score	2.45	1.16	5.25
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	742/894	511/534	1087/933
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Palm Centro	AT&T Tilt	Apple iPhone
Score	1.41	4.80	4.18
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	581/596	1039/1057	970/879
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

Color (2.62)
To test the quality of the color captured by the Blackjack II's camera we take photos of the industry standard GretagMacbeth color chart. Imatest analyzes the photos and compares the captured colors to the original ones. Imatest produces the chart below, where you can see the original table with the captured colors superimposed so you can see the differences.
Imatest also produces the chart below that illustrates exactly how accurate color capture is. In this chart the ideal color is indicated with a box while the captured color is marked with a circle. The longer the line between the two the more inaccurate the color capture.
You can see from these two charts that the Blackjack II has some serious issues when it comes to color capture. There is pretty significant drift in almost all colors, and most strikingly the whites are all over the place. This indicates that the Blackjack II does a poor job judging white balance, which throws off the rest of the colors in a scene. Although we have seen phones do worse, the Blackjack II's performance is pretty poor and is the worst amongst our comparison phones.

Cell Phone	Blackjack II	Nokia N81 8GB	BlackBerry Curve 8320
Score	2.62	3.21	4.92
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Palm Centro	AT&T Tilt	Apple iPhone
Score	8.08	5.50	5.22
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Noise (1.42)
To test the amount of noise produced at each lighting level we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four lighting levels ranging from a bright sunny day to candle light. We then use Imatest to analyze the amount of noise produced at each lighting level. Our final score is based on both the total noise produced and the consistency across lighting levels. The Blackjack II performed well in this test, putting up the best noise score amongst our comparison phones including very good scores in low lighting conditions where most phone cameras to very poorly. That being said you can see by the scores below that even a "good" camera phone isn't very good.

Cell Phone	Score
Blackjack II	1.42
Nokia N81 8GB	0.47
BlackBerry Curve 8320	1.41
Palm Centro	0.91
AT&T Tilt	1.23
Apple iPhone	1.20

Live Preview (4.0)
The Blackjack II's live preview takes up the entire screen, which we like to see. The Blackjack II's good sized display means that it's easy to see your subject on screen, however we did notice some problems. When panning we saw significant blurring and pixelation. More importantly, though, is that the live preview was not a good indication of what your final photos was going to look like. In particular we noticed that what you saw on screen had richer colors than the final photo, which seemed to indicate some sort of error in white balance. Not surprising given that we detected a similar problem in our color test above.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (3.45)
This test measures how long it takes to get the camera launched and take a photo from the home screen. This is important if you want to take spurt of the moment shots. The Blackjack II did not perform particularly well in this test, taking 5.8 seconds to launch the camera application and then capture a photo. You can see below that the Nokia N81 was also pretty slow but most of our comparison phones completed this test at least two seconds faster. Chances are that if you see a shot you want to take you'll probably miss it by the time you get the phone out and the camera launched.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Blackjack II	5.8	3.45
Nokia N81 8GB	4.5	4.44
BlackBerry Curve 8320	2.9	6.90
Palm Centro	3.8	5.26
AT&T Tilt	3.7	5.41
Apple iPhone	2.43	8.23

Shot to Shot Time (6.30)
This test measures how quickly you can take a series of photos with the Blackjack II's camera. When possible we use burst mode for this test and the Blackjack II does have such a mode. Using this feature we were able to take five photos in 2.39 seconds, which works out to 2.1 frames per second (fps), an excellent score. Where the fly hits the ointment is in the quality of those photos. Like so many camera phones the Blackjack II reduces the resolution of photos when capturing using burst mode, in this case the resolution goes down to a terrible 320 x 240. This means such photos are almost unusable for anything but sending via MMS, you certainly won't be able to print them out or even enjoy viewing them on a computer screen. If you try to get around this by taking a series of photos manually at maximum resolution you will find that the process is much slower.

Cell Phone	FPS	Score
Blackjack II	2.1	6.30
Nokia N81 8GB	0.9	2.70
BlackBerry Curve 8320	0.35	1.05
Palm Centro	0.28	0.84
AT&T Tilt	1.36	4.08
Apple iPhone	0.4	1.20

Shutter to Shot Time (1.33)
Shutter to shot time is the length of time it takes for a phone's camera to actually capture a photo once you've pressed the capture button. For the Blackjack II this time was 1.5 seconds, which is pretty atrocious. You can see below that the only comparison phone that does worse than the Blackjack II is the AT&T Tilt, which has the excuse of having an auto-focus lens. All of our other phones that share a fixed focus lens with the Blackjack II did much, much better. This is one of the worst scores we've seen from a fixed focus cell phone camera in this test. Waiting a second and a half to capture a photo once you've hit the capture button can ruin a ton of photos.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Blackjack II	1.5	1.33
Nokia N81 8GB	0.17	11.76
BlackBerry Curve 8320	0.43	4.65
Palm Centro	0.88	2.27
AT&T Tilt	1.64	1.22
Apple iPhone	0.4	5.00

Interface (4.0)
The Blackjack II's camera interface uses the whole screen as a viewfinder, which we like to see. Hitting the center select button will capture a photo while tapping on either of the soft keys or any of the directions of the D-Pad will bring up icons and labels for the soft keys. The icons across the top show you things like camera mode, resolution, white balance and how many photos you can still capture. The left soft key takes you to the album software while the right soft key opens the menus. It is with the menus that we have our biggest beef. instead of a camera-like interface as found on the AT&T Tilt or the Nokia N81 the Blackjack II's menus are just like those found in any other part of the Windows Mobile Standard interface. The most annoying thing is that the white menu blocks a significant portion of the screen, which only gets worse when you open one of the sub menus; not good.

Photo Album Software Internal (6.0)
The Blackjack II has different album software then found on most Windows Mobile devices. Instead of the standard Pictures & Videos application you get an interface called "my stuff", which is really just a glorified file browser. There are a couple of features we like in the interface, for example it's easy to select multiple files to manipulate them by hitting the * key. You can also create slide shows with a couple of options. There's really no compelling reason to have replaced the standard album software, though, and we wonder why Samsung and AT&T would force users who might be used to the Windows Mobile Standard platform learn new software, especially when the new software doesn't really improve on the old.

Manual Control (0.0)
The Blackjack II doesn't offer any manual controls for capturing photos.

Zoom (1.0)
There is a digital zoom built into the Blackjack II's camera. We only award a single point for digital zoom because all it does is crop and enlarge what you're seeing, which you can do just as easily with software on your desktop.

Focus (0.0)
The Blackjack II has a fixed focus lens, which means what you see is what you get. We don't award points for fixed focus lenses.

Flash (0.0)
The Blackjack II lacks a flash.

Metering (2.0)
Like most phones the Blackjack II has simple brightness controls, but unlike several Windows Mobile devices we've reviewed recently it lacks true metering controls that let you adjust from what point or points in the scene light is judged.

White Balance (2.0)
The Blackjack II has the typical selection of pre-sets for white balance, including tungsten, incandescent, daylight, etc.

Image Handling (5.0)
The album software found on the Blackjack II has some decent image handling options. Unlike the standard software found on Windows Mobile devices you can't do a color adjustment, but you can crop, rotate, resize and adjust brightness and contrast. All of these are options that most phones lack.

Video

Overall Video Score (6.0)
The Blackjack II captures video at 320 x 240 and 12 frames per second (fps). This is in the upper half of what we are seeing from cell phones, with devices like the N95 topping out the range with 640 x 480 and 30 fps video capture. Many phones, though, only capture at 176 x 144 pixels, which is only good for MMS. The video captured by the Blackjack II was decent enough that you won't be embarrassed to show it on a computer monitor or post it up onto Youtube. Pixelation was limited and noise wasn't too bad. It's not the best we've seen, but also not the worst.

Video Resolution (6.72)
To test video resolution we take video of the same industry standard resolution chart we use for still images. We then take frames from this video and use Imatest to score them using the same line widths per pixel height (lw/ph) standard we used for still images. The Blackjack II scored 233 lw/ph horizontal and 277 lw/ph vertical, which is pretty good. You can see below that this is similar to what we saw from the Nokia N81 and Palm Centro, two other phones that also produced good video capture. It's far better than the video produced by the AT&T Tilt, showing that the quality of still capture and video capture often diverge.

Cell Phone	lw/ph horizontal/vertical	Score
Blackjack II	233/277	6.72
Nokia N81 8GB	247/272	6.72
BlackBerry Curve 8320	N/A	0.00
Palm Centro	249/274	6.82
AT&T Tilt	183.2/177.3	3.25
Apple iPhone	N/A	0.00

Video Compression (2.0)
The Blackjack II only captures video in 3GP format, which is standard for mobile video. Still, this format does compress the video more than we like and it would have been nice to have the option to capture in Mpeg-4 or H264 to produce even better videos2

Interface (4.0)
The Blackjack II camcorder interface is very similar to the stills camera interface. We don't like the menu system that can cover half the screen, but do like that the whole screen is used as a viewfinder. When recording transparent white bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen showing you what the soft key functions are and giving you a timer for how long you've recorded. When not recording the icons and labels disappear and then reappear when you tap a soft key or a direction on the D-Pad. It's decent, but we've seen much better from phones like the Nokia N81 or Palm Centro.

Manual Control (0.0)
The Blackjack II doesn't offer any manual controls for video capture.

Zoom (1.0)
Like the stills camera the Blackjack II's video camera has a digital zoom that's of limited functionality. What's even more annoying is that you can't zoom while capturing video, so you'll have to stop, zoom and then resume if you want to get a close up of whatever you're video taping.

Editing (0.0)
The Blackjack II doesn't offer any editing features for videos.

Modes (4.0)
The Blackjack II's video camera has a specific mode for MMS video capture and also offers a couple of scene modes, including white balance options.

Previous    Next
Shop for a wireless plan Shop Carrier Type Minutes $/Min Cost Shop   Close Prepaid 0 0.1000 0.00