Sanyo Katana DLX Cell Phone Review - Imaging
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Alfredo Padilla Published on August 06, 2007 Comment on this |
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Resolution (0.45)
To test resolution we take photos of an industry standard resolution chart and run the photos through the Imatest software. Imatest produces a score called line widths per pixel height (lw/ph), a measure of how many alternating white and black lines can be discerned before they start blurring together.
| Cell Phone | Sanyo Katana DLX | Nokia N75 | Sprint Upstage |
| Score | 0.45 | 1.14 | 2.05 |
| lw/ph horizontal/vertical | 316.6 / 249.4 | 505.9 / 698.8 | 678.9 / 547.1 |
| Image of Resolution Chart (click to view) |  |
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| Cell Phone | Motorola Krzr K1m | Sanyo M1 | LG Chocolate VX8550 |
| Score | 0.62 | 3.29 | 1.69 |
| lw/ph horizontal/vertical | 386.6 / 454.2 | 859.9 / 773.4 | 616.8 / 569.5 |
| Image of Resolution Chart (click to view) |  |
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Color (6.54)
To test how well the Katana DLX's camera reproduced colors we took a series of photos of the industry standard GretagMacbeth color chart, which displays 24 different colors. We run these photos through the Imatest software, which compares the captured colors with the chart's original colors.
| Cell Phone | Sanyo Katana DLX | Nokia N75 | Sprint Upstage |
| Score | 6.54 | 3.47 | 3.85 |
| Color Checker Chart (click to view) |  |
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| Cell Phone | Motorola Krzr K1m | Sanyo M1 | LG Chocolate VX8550 |
| Score | 3.59 | 5.66 | 4.69 |
| Color Checker Chart (click to view) |  |
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Noise (0.83)
To test noise we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four different lighting levels, ranging from 60 lux (equivalent to a darkened room with just a single candle) to 3000 lux (a bright, sunny day). We run the resulting photos through Imatest and judge noise at each lighting level. Unfortunately the Katana DLX did not perform well in our noise test, producing higher than average noise at each lighting level and exhibiting a great deal of variance across lighting levels. Because our noise score not only judges total noise but also variance, the Katana DLX's overall score is very poor, although you'll see in the table below that several of our comparison phones also put up poor scores in this test; we gneerally don't expect cell phone cameras to do well in this test.
| Cell Phone | Score |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 0.83 |
| Nokia N75 | 0.41 |
| Sprint Upstage | 1.45 |
| Motorola Krzr K1m | 0.76 |
| Sanyo M1 | 0.67 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 1.27 |
Live Preview (6.0)
The Katana DLX's live preview takes advantage of the entire screen, which we appreciate. While the color reproduction provided by the screen is slightly washed out, it is an accurate reproduction of the final photo. The preview did not display artifacts or pixellation, however it did give us some trouble when moving the handset to pan across a scene, as the image quickly became flickery and hard to see. We felt the Katana DLX's live preview was better than the Samsung Upstage or Krzr K1m, but its issues with color reproduction make it just a bit worse than the Sanyo M1's live preview. Unlocked Standby to First Shot (6.45)
To test how quickly we can go from phone closed to taking a photo we time how long this process takes repeatedly until we get a consistently reproducible result. The Sanyo Katana DLX took 3.1 seconds to take a photo from phone closed. This isn't a particularly good time. You can see from the table below that the Sprint Upstage, Krzr K1m, and Chocolate XV8550 were faster than the Katana DLX. The Sanyo M1's poor score is the result of an auto focus lens, which takes longer to take a photo as it takes time to focus the frame. The Nokia N75 doesn't have an auto focus lens; it's just slow.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 3.10 | 6.45 |
| Nokia N75 | 4.70 | 4.26 |
| Sprint Upstage | 2.70 | 7.41 |
| Motorola Krzr K1m | 2.50 | 8.00 |
| Sanyo M1 | 4.90 | 4.08 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 2.36 | 8.47 |
Shot to Shot Time (6.3)
Shot to shot time is a measure of how quickly you can take a series of photos with the camera. When possible we attempt to use Burst mode for this test. The Katana DLX does have a Burst mode, but like many cell phones with such modes, you should note the resolution of the resulting photos plummets. In the Katana DLX's case it goes all the way down to 320 x 240. Using the Burst mode on the Katana, which we set to fast, we were able to capture six photos in 2.8 seconds. This works out to 2.1 frames per seconds (fps), a good score. We must emphasize again, though, that photos captured like this are such low resolution they won't be useful for anything except MMS or showing off on your phone. When we captured six photos in a row manually at full resolution the Katana DLX plummeted to .2 fps.
| Cell Phone | FPS | Score |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 2.10 | 6.30 |
| Nokia N75 | 0.43 | 1.29 |
| Sprint Upstage | 0.20 | 0.60 |
| Motorola Krzr K1m | 0.23 | 0.69 |
| Sanyo M1 | 2.00 | 6.00 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 0.38 | 1.14 |
Shutter to Shot Time (5.26)
Shutter to shot time is a measure of how long it takes to actually capture a photo once you have depressed the shutter button. We repeat this test until we get the lowest consistently repeatable time. The Katana DLX's shutter to shot time was .38 seconds. This is an average time, albeit a bit slower than the Chocolate XV8550, but much faster than the Nokia N75's terrible time. The Sanyo M1 also did poorly on this test, but like the standby to first shot time it is significantly slowed down by its auto focus lens.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 0.38 | 5.26 |
| Nokia N75 | 0.73 | 2.74 |
| Sprint Upstage | 0.30 | 6.67 |
| Motorola Krzr K1m | 0.40 | 5.00 |
| Sanyo M1 | 0.80 | 2.50 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 0.22 | 9.09 |
Interface (7.5)
The Katana DLX's camera interface is clean and well organized. As we've already mentioned, the entire screen is used as a viewfinder, with icons indicating the status of various settings superimposed and transparent. The left soft key is assigned to capture a photo, although we would have preferred another function since the center select key on the directional pad does the same thing. The right soft key opens the menu, where you have a rather extensive range of options. We found the menu system to be a little arcane, with sub menus containing items that weren't very intuitive. For example, you wouldn't normally expect Burst mode to be in a menu under "Fun Tools". We were happy to see there are hardware shortcuts. Up/down on the D-Pad turns the various on-screen indicators on/off, while left/right controls zoom. The key for 3 opens user settings, 7 sharpness, 8 contrast, 9 white balance, and # brightness settings. We appreciate quick access to these settings. We like the user interface of the Sanyo M1, and the Katana DLX's interface is similarly good. Our only real issues are the rather extensive and unintuitive menu options.
Photo Album Software Internal (4.0)
The photo album software on the Katana DLX is pretty basic. When you open the "My Albums" feature in the Pictures menu you are given the choice of viewing photos/videos on the phone, on your memory card, or in your online albums. Once you have selected a location you are shown a 3 x 3 grid of thumbnails of both videos and photos. We found the rendering of the thumbnails to be a little slow. Each thumbnail has a small box in the bottom left corner, and highlighting an item and pressing the center select button on the D-Pad will put a check in the box. This allows you to easily select multiple items to move or delete, however it may be a little unintuitive to those who expect the center select key to open an item. The left soft key is assigned to "expand", which actually opens the currently selected item. The right soft key opens a menu where you can access various commands to move, copy, delete, send, and otherwise manipulate the files.
Once you have a photo opened it will be shown in the center of the screen with interface commands filling the top third and bottom quarter of the screen. Pressing up/down on the D-Pad will allow you to view the item full screen. Left/right will move to the previous or next photo. The left soft key will take you back to the thumbnail view, while the right soft key again opens a menu that gives access to various functions. One item we found was the ability to send a photo directly to a Bluetooth printer.
The slideshow will show you items in full screen, with new items appearing after a few seconds. There are no transitional effects or music, and no options available to control the slideshow. Overall we found the album software on the Katana to be fairly simple to use but without a lot of advanced features, especially in the slideshow.
Manual Control (4.0)
The Katana DLX has a decent selection of manual controls, including manual white balance and various Scene modes. You can also manually control sharpness and contrast, however we don't award points for these as they are not very useful on a low resolution camera phone. More advanced manual controls like Shutter Priority mode are not available. Zoom (1.0)
The Katana DLX includes a digital zoom that is thankfully available at the highest resolution level. The zoom can be easily accessed by using left/right on the directional pad. There are 12 steps of zoom available, and we judge it to be about 2x or 3x at maximum zoom. As always, we are not very impressed by digital zooms that only crop and enlarge what you are seeing, but at least you can use it at the maximum resolution, unlike the Chocolate XV8550.
Focus (0.0)
The Katana DLX is a fixed focus lens, which means what you see is what you get. Some phones nowadays, such as the Sanyo M1, are including auto focus lenses, which produce better photos but slow down your capture speed.
Flash (0.0)
The Katana DLX does not have a flash.
Metering (2.0)
The Katana DLX does not include any metering controls, however it does include manual brightness settings. True metering controls allow you to control from which point or points light in the scene is judged.
White Balance (2.0)
The Katana DLX has four presets available for white balance, including Sunny, Cloudy, Tungsten, and Flourescent. You can also set white balance to Automatic. As we mentioned in the manual controls section manual white balance controls are also available.
Image Handling (3.0)
The image handling options available on the Katana DLX are not very extensive. You can add a caption to a photo, and we are very happy to see that you can resize photos, but that's it. More advanced features found on smart phones like the Nokia N75, such as Red-eye correction, cropping images, and contrast correction, are not available on the Katana DLX.
Video
Overall Video Score (1.0)
The video captured by the Katana DLX is not very high quality. In our sample video we saw serious pixellation, washed out colors, and very little detail captured. Given the maximum resolution of 176 x 144 this is not surprising, but it's poor even for this low resolution. The quality isn't a patch on the very good video captured by the Nokia N75. The video capture is barely MMS worthy, and we feel sorry for anyone who wants to watch the video on a computer screen, much less a television.
Video Resolution (3.63)
To test video resolution we take a video of the same resolution chart we use for still photos. We then pull frames from this video and run them through the Imatest software, which produces the same line widths per pixel height (lw/ph) score we got for still resolution. The Katana DLX scored 200.5 lw/ph horizontal and 181.2 lw/ph vertical. This is a low score, but not terrible. It's better than the terrible score put up by the Sprint Upstage, and slightly better than the Krzr K1m, but as we mentioned above it's nowhere near as good as the Nokia N75 or the Sanyo M1.
| Cell Phone | lw/ph horizontal/vertical | Score |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 200.5 / 181.2 | 3.63 |
| Nokia N75 | 315 / 348.1 | 10.97 |
| Sprint Upstage | 77.1 / 109.5 | 0.84 |
| Motorola Krzr K1m | 234.7 / 101.3 | 2.38 |
| Sanyo M1 | 247.5 / 297.7 | 7.37 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 218.3 / 200.8 | 4.38 |
Video Compression (2.0)
The Katana DLX only captures video in a single format, 3GP. We would normally wish for more formats, but given that the quality of video captures isn't very good anyways we don't think people would need or want additional formats on the Katana DLX.
Interface (0.0)
The video capture interface on the Katana DLX is different from the still camera in that it doesn't use the whole screen as a viewfinder. Instead the viewfinder only takes up the center of the screen, with indicators above and below it. Even this small area is bigger than the actual video captures, and by using up/down on the directional pad you can toggle between using the larger view or viewing only the smaller capture window. There is a zoom available that can be accessed by using left/right, just as on the still camera interface. The left soft key is assigned to record, while the right soft key opens a menu to access various options. As with the still camera we found the assignment of record to the left soft key to be redundant, as the center key of the directional pad fulfills the same function. We were also happy to see keypad shortcuts, with 3 opening user settings, 8 contrast, 9 white balance, and # brightness. We didn't like the camcorder interface as much as the camera interface due to the more constrained viewfinder, but otherwise it's very similar.
Manual Control (2.0)
As with the still camera you have access to manual white balance, but that's about it.
Zoom (1.0)
The Katana DLX's video camera has a digital zoom that's of limited utility given the low resolution videos it captures.
Editing (0.0)
The Katana DLX does not offer any video editing features.
Modes (2.0)
The Katana DLX has a few Scene modes available for video capture, but we were disappointed to see no specific capture settings for MMS or e-mail.
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