Well - there's a lot of personal prefs here, but here goes starting with the camera:
First, I turn off auto everything. I set ISO by hand, usually 200 or 400 does the trick.
I set the auto-focus off and set it to spot metering - that way, I can actually tap the point in the screen I care about, it focuses to that, light meters to that.
I usually set my brightness to +1 or even +2.
Contrast, -1, Saturation, +1, Sharpness -2.
I set resolution to 8 MP, widescreen (5:3) and quality high - I tend to crop my pictures after I shoot them.
Video:
I read the thing where the settings remain for video but another user here said, No Soap! - so maybe going with auto-exposure - even auto-focus - might be easier for video.
Even with the high-light, higher fps capability, I'm not doing any 720p recording - what little I'm doing is all 640x480 vga, with the MPEG4 codec selected. (That's a clumsy sentence. I give up. What I'm saying is - with higher light, you'll get more fps with 720p and it's still not good enough, in my view.)
Mostly, I'm waiting on a better codec (fingers crossed) for the camcorder side - there's no substitute for more frames per second in
moving pictures.
If you don't have something on your main computer, then I recommend using the free from the Market, Photoshop.com Mobile. You can adjust for exposure/color/etc errors and make refinements - including cropping, and you can flip-back-to-correct shots from the front camera, because those will be mirror-image bassackwards.
If you're going to share your movies, then in my opinion you want to consider a coupla options:
One guy suggested that he uploaded his to a private thing on YouTube and then just emailed the link to friends and family. I've haven't tried that but I thought it was darned smart thinking.
The other would be to consider converting your MPEG4 files to a codec you know everyone will prolly have and these days, that's h.264, in my opinion.
I've used this for years and swear by it:
Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows
For OS X, you also want:
Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components
Even on Windows, it requires
QuickTime from Apple - or you get a work-alike by following the links at MPEG StreamClip site - also, take their advice and get the other codecs you'll need.
Your video and picture files will be under /sdcard/DCIM/MEDIA100 - the video files will end with 3gp. On some computers, they play fine, on others picture no sound, on others vice versa - welcome to the codec wars, hence my recommendation to convert before sharing with friends.
And that H.264 thing isn't a hard and fast rule - use whatever works for your crowd, avi, etc, whatever - that's just one I tend to trust personally anymore.
Whatever you choose for conversion, usually the automatic settings will work great for you - MPEG4 is really MPEG4 Part 2, H.264 is really MPEG4 Part 10 - and because MPEG stands for the Moving Pictures Experts Group - the international insider industry pros for movies - I stay with their specs rather than one chosen by Microsoft or Apple.
Anyway - these are just my opinions, you'll have to give them a go and see what you think.
