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Home > Reviews > Manufacturer > T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review

T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review - Imaging

Alfredo Padilla
Published on November 21, 2007 Comment on this

Resolution (2.28)
To test the resolution of photos produced by the T-Mobile Shadow's two megapixel camera we take photos of an industry standard resolution chart. These photos are then run through the Imatest software, which produces a score called line widths per pixel height (lw/ph). This score indicates how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start blurring together.

The T-Mobile Shadow did not perform particularly well in this test, scoring 717 lw/ph horizontal and 766 lw/ph vertical. This is is worse than both the BlackBerry Curve and Razr V9m, both of which have 2 megapixel cameras as well. In fact as you look at our comparison chart below you will notice that all most of the lowest scores belong to phones produced by HTC, which has traditionally not made very good phone cameras.

Cell Phone	T-Mobile Shadow	HTC Touch on Sprint	BlackBerry Curve 8320
Score	2.28	3.56	5.25
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	717 / 766	895 / 1082	1087 / 933
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Razr2 V9m on Verizon	Helio Ocean	T-Mobile Wing
Score	4.34	2.18	1.26
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	988 / 958	701 / 476.6	533.3 / 422
Image of Resolution Chart (click to view)

Color (5.61)
To see how well the T-Mobile Shadow's camera reproduces color we take photos of the industry standard GretagMacbeth color chart, which displays 24 different colors. We then run these photos through Imatest, which compares the captured colors to the original chart colors.

Imatest produces the chart above, which shows the captured colors in the outer square, the ideal color in the small rectangle and the original adjusted color in the inner square. Imatest also produces the chart below that indicates the ideal color with square with the actual captured color with a circle. The longer the line between the two the more inaccurate the color capture.

As you can see the T-Mobile Shadow didn't perform too badly in this test. We did see some innacuracies in reds, blues and yellows, but nothing as bad as what we've seen on phones like the HTC Touch or T-Mobile Wing. We would call the T-Mobile Shadow's performance fairly average, and as you can see below it falls right in the middle of our comparison phones.

Cell Phone	T-Mobile Shadow	HTC Touch on Sprint	BlackBerry Curve 8320
Score	5.61	2.23	4.92
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Cell Phone	Razr2 V9m on Verizon	Helio Ocean	T-Mobile Wing
Score	5.71	6.66	3.35
Color Checker Chart (click to view)

Noise (1.23)
To measure how much noise is produced by the Shadow's camera we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four different lighting levels, ranging from bright to low light. We then run these photos through Imatest, which produces a noise score at each level. We consider both the level of noise at each lighting level and consistency across lighting levels to produce our final score. The T-Mobile Shadow performed reasonably well in our test, producing fairly low noise at every lighting level except the lowest. Noise levels at the three higher lighting levels where also very consistent. You can see below that there really isn't very much differentiation across scores, because frankly almost all cell phone cameras are pretty poor when it comes to noise, but the Shadow did do better than any other comparison phone except the BlackBerry Curve 8320.

Cell Phone	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	1.23
HTC Touch on Sprint	1.14
BlackBerry Curve 8320	1.41
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	0.84
Helio Ocean	1.14
T-Mobile Wing	1.10

Live Preview (6.0)
The live preview on the T-Mobile Shadow's camera is pretty good. We like that the whole screen is used for the preview, and the color you see on the preview is pretty true both to what you're looking at and what is finally captured. Where the Shadow did show a little bit of an issue is with the refresh rate, when you pan the camera we did see some blurring and artifacts, so you'll want to hold the camera still when taking a photo.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (6.25)
This test measures how long it takes to whip your phone out of your pocket, launch the camera and take a photo. This is important for those who like to use their cell phone cameras to take quick spurt of the moment shots. We do this test until we get a consistent time. The T-Mobile Shadow took 3.2 seconds to take a photo under these conditions. This is on the slow side, you can see below that only the Helio Ocean took more time in this test. Of course any camera phone is going to be slower than a dedicated point and shoot camera, but with the Shadow you better hope that your subject for quick shots will hold still for a few seconds.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	3.2	6.25
HTC Touch on Sprint	2.7	7.41
BlackBerry Curve 8320	2.9	6.90
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	2.85	7.02
Helio Ocean	4.1	4.88
T-Mobile Wing	2.97	6.73

Shot to Shot Time (5.28)
Shot to shot time is a measure of how long it takes to take a series of photos in quick succession. When possible we use a camera's burst mode to do this test. The Shadow does have such a burst mode, called Sport mode, and we were able to take three photos in 1.7 seconds using it. It should be noted however that like many burst modes on camera phones the photos taken are at a much lower resolution, 640 x 480 instead of the maximum 1600 x 1200. This means the quality of the photo will be much lower, if you want to take a series of photos at full resolution you'll need to do so manually, which will slow you down significantly. The Shadow's performance in this test using burst mode works out to 1.76 frames per second (fps), which is pretty decent. You can see below that only the T-Mobile Wing did better in this test than the Shadow, although several other phones had results that were pretty similar. If you're willing to take the hit on the quality of the photos the Shadow's burst mode should allow you to capture some actions shots.

Cell Phone	FPS	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	1.76	5.28
HTC Touch on Sprint	1.67	5.00
BlackBerry Curve 8320	0.35	1.05
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	0.29	0.86
Helio Ocean	1.25	3.75
T-Mobile Wing	2.3	6.90

Shutter to Shot Time (2.22)
Shutter to shot time measures how long it takes for a camera to actually capture a photo once you've hit the shutter button. We do this test repeatedly until we get a consistent result. The T-Mobile Shadow had a delay of 0.9 seconds when you hit the shutter button, which is pretty bad. You can see below that it performed worse in this test than any of our comparison phones. The Shadow's poor performance in this test means that when taking regular photos you better make sure that your subject is still, because this camera needs some processing time.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	0.9	2.22
HTC Touch on Sprint	0.26	7.69
BlackBerry Curve 8320	0.43	4.65
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	0.34	5.88
Helio Ocean	0.6	3.33
T-Mobile Wing	0.43	4.65

Interface (5.0)

The camera interface on the T-Mobile Shadow is pretty good. Like many HTC handsets the full screen is used for the preview with controls overlaid. You can pull up a camera-like menu interface when you hit the right soft key, while the left one takes you to the album. You can control the camera mode by using left/right on the D-Pad while up/down controls zoom, when it's available. What isn't so great about the camera interface is what happens when you're done taking a photo.

Instead of the standard HTC review screen with a few small icons on the bottom of the screen that allow you to save, delete or send the photo, T-Mobile has instead inserted it's own review screen that is not very well thought out. First of all it's focused on T-Mobile's online album service, which we can't imagine many people use. When the photo review comes up you have the option to go back to the camera, upload the photo to the online album or go see the menu. The second problem comes up when you decide to go into the menu, perhaps because you want to send the picture via MMS.

What happens now is that the interface switches orientation, as illustrated above, and you're given a menu with six options. But it doesn't stop there, instead of having straightforward and simple options, many of these take you to another sub menu, so to send a photo via email you will have to go through multiple menus. The end result is a clunky and difficult to use system. Thankfully you can turn this off in the settings and then photos will revert to the more simple and well thought out HTC default review screen. Unless you actually use T-Mobile's online albums we recommend you turn this feature off.

Photo Album Software Internal (7.0)

The photo album software on the T-Mobile Shadow is the same Pictures & Video software used on all Windows Mobile Standard devices. This isn't a bad thing as this software does a decent job, presenting photos in a grid of thumbnails and with the ability to create a basic slide show. You can also create folders to store you images in and easily move photos between folders. Not the best album software we've ever seen, but it does the basics well. We do wish that there were more slide show options however.

Manual Control (2.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow's doesn't provide users with any of the manual controls we normally look for like manual white balance and full manual mode, however it does have a couple of manual controls we thought were worth a couple of points. First is the ability to manually adjust contrast, hue, saturation and contrast. This is buried in the menu under image properties, so you have to go looking for it. There's also a setting for flicker adjustment, which allows you three presets to better control the shutter speed depending on how the lighting is flickering.

Zoom (0.0)
Although the T-Mobile Shadow does have a digital zoom, the zoom is not available at the highest capture resolution. Given that all digital zoom does is crop and enlarge an area of what you're seeing only being able to use it at lower resolution settings makes it almost useless. As such we are not awarding any points to the Shadow for zoom.

Focus (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow has a fixed focus lens, which means what you see is what you get. We do not award points for fixed focus lenses.

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

Metering (6.0)
Like many of the newer HTC phones we've reviewed the T-Mobile Shadow has some basic metering controls. Metering allows you to control from which point or points of the scene that light is judged. The Shadow allows you to choose from center area and average metering. There are also manual brightness settings available.

White Balance (2.0)

The Shadow has several pre-sets for white balance, including incandescent and fluorescent. There's no evaluative white balance that uses a white card to set white balance.

Image Handling (6.0)

The T-Mobile Shadow's album software provides some decent image handling options. You can rename, rotate and crop photos. You can also use an auto-correct feature to try and adjust the photo automatically. This isn't as many options as you see on some high end Nokia N-Series devices, but it's significantly better than what most phones come with. If you want to do more serious imaging adjustments on the Shadow you can probably go find some third party software that gives you more image handling options.

Video

Overall Video Score (1.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow captures video at a fairly low resolution of 176 x 144 pixels. The quality of the video is pretty bad. Color fidelity was decent, but any motion or panning will cause serious blurring and artifacts. Of course most videos have some kind of movement in them, so you're unlikely to be able to capture any kind of decent video on the Shadow.

Video Resolution (2.59)
To test the resolution of video captured by the T-Mobile Shadow's camera we take a video of the same industry standard resolution chart we use for the stills resolution test. We then run frames from this video through Imatest to produce the same line widths per pixel height (lw/ph) score, which measures how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start blurring together. The T-Mobile Shadow scored 156 lw/ph horizontal and 166 lw/ph vertical. This isn't a particularly good score, as you can see below only the T-Mobile Wing scored worse on this test than the Shadow.

Cell Phone	lw/ph horizontal/vertical	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	156 / 166	2.59
HTC Touch on Sprint	204 / 221	4.51
BlackBerry Curve 8320	n/a - no video capture	0.00
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	208 / 244	5.08
Helio Ocean	283.2 / 160.1	4.53
T-Mobile Wing	82.39 / 141.3	1.16

Video Compression (2.0)
Video on the T-Mobile Shadow is captured in an Mpeg-4 variant of 3GP. You don't have any other options for video capture, which considering the poor quality of the video probably isn't too big a deal.

Interface (6.0)

The video interface on the T-Mobile Shadow's is very similar to the image capture interface, except that instead of using the whole screen as a viewfinder only a small box in the center is used, which we don't like. The way controls are overlaid and camera-like however is good, and thankfully videos don't use the same terrible T-mobile review interface as still images.

Manual Control (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow's video capture doesn't offer any manual controls.

Zoom (1.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow's video capture offers up to 2x digital zoom. Given how small the resolution of the video capture already is, digital zoom is well nigh useless, but because it's available at all resolution levels we do award a point for it.

Editing (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow doesn't allow you to edit videos.

Modes (5.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow has a separate capture mode for MMS video, which is a nice feature given that videos captured on the phone are really only good for MMS messages. Manual brightness controls and metering controls are also on board.

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