Camera phones come of age

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Friday 11 March 2011 at 8:23am
Tags: cameras | digitisation | optical character recognition | photography |

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Early results satisfied my low expectations, however after removing the protective film that covered the camera and lens, things improved dramatically. The image quality was clearly much better than what I was expecting and under good lighting the picture was potentially useable.

At first I used the bundled camera application this however was easily confused by overly light or dark subjects and the white balance was measured continuously. I was then introduced to a third party app (application) which offered far more control and the camera was beginning to look like a tool I could put to work in various teaching and learning activities. Smartphone apps such as AlmostDSLR allow the user to lock the focus, white balance and exposure this helps you to create the 'look' you want. Camera phones seem to use an auto ISO system which cannot be adjusted and so it is essential that pictures are taken in good lighting if image 'noise' is to be avoided.

Encouraged by the early results I thought I would explore further, the phone has a built in LED flash, I thought I would see if this would trigger a slaved studio flash. Perhaps this was a little ambitious, it fired occasionally but far from reliably and this test was abandoned.

I then returned to real world uses for this type of phone and photographed a printed document to recreate tests I carried out for the OCR document released last year. Again I have to say that the results were very impressive, under good ambient light or with the built in LED flash images captured with the phone were converted to readable PDF files with ABBYY Finereader with no errors found.

With the ability to email the images directly from the phone to a desktop PC  the smartphone fits well into a teaching and learning workflow.

It is clear that the smartphone camera can not compete with traditional cameras when it comes to high quality capture, but if used with care it can be a useful tool for the casual photographer.

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