Samsung Instinct Cell Phone Review - Imaging

The Samsung Instinct's stills camera did not do well in our resolution and color tests, in fact it did pretty poorly. Video capture was much better. If you like a lot of options on your phone's camera the Instinct probably isn't for you as there aren't any.

Resolution (1.40)
To test resolution we took photos with the Samsung Instinct's two megapixel camera of an industry standard Applied Image 12233 resolution chart. We then run these photos through Imatest software to get a score called line widths per picture height (lw/ph), which measures how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start blurring together.

The Samsung Instinct's camera scored 562 lw/ph horizontal and 623 lw/ph vertical in our test. This is pretty poor. You can see from the table below that the Samsung Glyde and Apple iPhone performed much better in this test, although several of our other comparison phones did as bad or worse than the Instinct. The practical result is that you shouldn't expect too much detail out of photos you take with the Instinct.

Cell Phone	Samsung Instinct	Samsung Glyde	Nokia N81 (8GB)
Score	1.40	4.04	1.16
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	562/623	954/960	511/534
Image of Resolution Chart

Cell Phone	LG Voyager	Palm Centro	Apple iPhone
Score	2.93	1.41	4.18
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	837.9/838.9	581/596	970/879
Image of Resolution Chart

Color (1.67)
To test how well the Samsung Instinct's camera reproduces colors we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart, which displays twenty-four different colors. We run these photos through Imatest software, which compares the captured colors to the original chart colors.

Above you can see the chart as produced by Imatest, with original and captured colors indicated. Below is another chart that Imatest produces, which shows you the difference between captured colors (circles) and ideal colors (square). The longer the line between the two the more inaccurately the colors.

You can see that the Instinct performed pretty poorly in this test. The fact that whites in particular are shifted and all colors seem to be shifted in the same direction indicates that this is a problem with the Instinct's automatic white balance settings. Unfortunately the Samsung Instinct's camera doesn't offer you any white balance controls, so there's no way to fix this on the camera side. You should be able to adjust photos in editing software to improve the color accuracy somewhat. You can see below that the Instinct's performance on this test was the worst amongst our comparison phones.

Cell Phone	Samsung Instinct	Samsung Glyde	Nokia N81 (8GB)
Score	1.67	2.32	3.21
Color Checker Chart

Cell Phone	LG Voyager	Palm Centro	Apple iPhone
Score	5.31	8.08	5.22
Color Checker Chart

Noise (1.37)
To test noise we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four different lighting levels and then run the photos through Imatest to measure how much noise is present at each lighting level. We consider both consistency across lighting levels and total noise in our final score. The Samsung Instinct did reasonably in this test, putting up the second best noise score amongst our comparison phones. Of course that's not saying much, you can see from the scores below that no phone does well in this test, the result of the small sensors used in cell phone cameras.

Noise

Live Preview (7.0)
The Samsung Instinct's live preview takes up the center two third of the display, with controls arrayed to the left and right. We prefer phones that use the entire display for the preview, but on the other hand the Instinct's screen is so large that for all practical purposes you get a larger live preview than most phones even using only part of it. The live preview does a good job reproducing what you'll see in the final photo, both in terms of colors and framing. We didn't note very much trailing or artifacting when panning and the image looked sharp. We were quite happy with the Instinct's live preview.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (7.69)
It took us 2.6 seconds to go from the home screen unlocked until we were able to capture a photo on the Instinct. This is a good time, you can see below that it's faster than average and was only slightly beat out by the iPhone. The camera on the Instinct is pretty quick to launch, for a phone, but note that it's still not as fast as a dedicate point and shoot camera. 2.6 seconds can still be a long time to wait to capture that perfect shot, but it will give you a better chance than most phones. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (sec)

Shot to Shot Time (1.14)
It took the Samsung Instinct 13.1 second to capture a series of five photos, which works out to 0.38 frames per second. You can see below that this is below average, although several of our comparison phones also performed poorly in this test. The Samsung Instinct was hurt in this test by the lack of a burst mode for capturing photos, as such we had to take the series of photos manually, which meant we had to sit and wait for each photo to be saved before we could take the next one. The Instinct's poor performance in this test means you likely won't be able to capture action shots very well, the place where good shot to shot time is most important. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shot to Shot (fps)

Shutter to Shot Time (6.45)
Shutter to shot time measures how long it takes the Instinct to actually capture a photo once you've pressed the shutter key. The Samsung Instinct took 0.31 seconds to capture a photo, which is pretty good. You can see below that this is faster than average and only a couple of our comparison phones performed better. What this means is that you won't have to hold your breath and hope that the scene doesn't change while your phone's camera takes forever to capture a photo, like you would have to with the Samsung Glyde. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shutter to Shot (sec)

Interface (6.0)
The Samsung Instinct's camera interface is exceedingly simple. The center two thirds is taken up by the live preview. To the left there is a single button that shows you how many photos you can capture. To the right are two buttons, one to switch to video capture mode and the other to take you to the albums software. That's it, there are no other controls available. In terms of simplicity you can't beat it, but of course some people might want to do things like adjust your white balance mode, especially given the camera's poor color capture performance. Alas you can't.

Photo Album Software Internal (5.5)
Thankfully the Instinct's album software is a bit more fully featured than the camera interface. When you enter the interface, which appears in landscape orientation, you see a 5 x 4 grid of thumbnails. To the left of the grid are three controls: delete, send via Bluetooth and play slideshow. To the right are four buttons, from the top: camera, send message via MMS, upload to online photo service (including Myspace and Photobucket, but not Facebook or Flickr), and switch view. This last button switches to a layout reminiscent to the gallery found on Nokia S60 devices like the N82, see the picture below as it's easier to see it than explain it.

When you select a photo you get a couple more options, including the ability to assign a photo to a contact or your wallpaper and a zoom option. What the album software is missing is any way to organize your photos by sorting or creating folders/albums. It also lacks support for adjusting slide show settings. Despite these drawbacks we think the album software does a decent job at the most important bits, allowing you to view your photos and send them along to others.

Manual Control (0.0)
The Samsung Instinct's camera provides no manual controls.

Zoom (0.0)
The Samsung Instinct's camera does not have a zoom.

Focus (1.0)
The Instinct's camera is fixed focus, which means what you see is what you get. That said there is a nice extra feature that warns you if the shot is fuzzy. We though this was worth a bonus point in this section. Normally we don't award any points for fixed focus cameras.

Flash (0.0)
The Instinct does not have a flash.

Metering (0.0)
There are no metering options on the Instinct, not even a simple brightness control that almost all cell phone cameras have.

White Balance (0.0)
As we've mentioned a couple of times now the Instinct lacks any white balance controls. This is one of the biggest problem with the camera as our color test above indicates that the Instinct's auto white balance is not very good.

Image Handling (0.0)
The Instinct does not allow you to edit your photos, you can't even rename them.

Video Quality (7.0)
We found the quality of the Samsung Instinct's video to be pretty good. Colors were a little washed out but detail was good without a lot of pixelation or artifacts, even when panning. We were able to blow the video up to twice its size without any major problems and even at full screen on a 13 inch laptop display it didn't look bad. We wouldn't recommend throwing it up on a TV screen, though, there's only so much you can expect from 320 x 240 pixel video at 15 frames per second. Still the video is quite good enough for Youtube.

Video Resolution (8.40)
To test the resolution of video captured with the Samsung Instinct's camcorder we take video of the same industry standard Applied Image 12233 resolution chart we used for our stills resolution test. We take frames from this video and run them through Imatest software to produce a line widths per picture height score, which measures how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they begin blurring together. The Samsung Instinct performed quite well in this test scoring 286 lw/ph horizontal and 294 lw/ph vertical. You can see below that amongst our comparison phones only the Samsung Glyde was able to put up a similar score.

Video Compression (2.0)
The Samsung Instinct captures video in a single format, 3GP.

Interface (0.0)
The interface on the Instinct's camcorder is very similar to the stills camera interface. The center two-thirds of the screen is used as a viewfinder. To the left is a timer button, instead of the counter found on the stills camera. Tapping this will toggle the timer in the lower left of the live preview. To the right is a button to switch to the stills camera at the top and a shortcut to the album software at the bottom. There is an extra button here that isn't found on the stills camera that allows you to switch between saving video to the phone itself or to the memory card. The key difference is that if you are saving to the phone you are limited to two minutes in length. If you save to the memory card your video can be any length. As with the stills camera it's definitely simple but we do wish there were a few more options.

Manual Control (0.0)
There are no manual controls when capturing video on the Instinct.

Zoom (0.0)
As with the stills camera there is no zoom available for video capture.

Editing (0.0)
You cannot edit video on the Instinct.

Modes (0.0)
As we mention above switching between saving on the phone and saving to the card acts somewhat like a mode switch in that videos saved to the phone are limited to two minutes, which is the maximum for MMS. But in practice you can still save to the card and just make sure you don't go over the two minute limit for MMS video, in fact you even get a friendly warning of such when you do switch the save location to the memory card. As such we won't award any points here.