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Good quality camera (phone) recommends sought.

siltsunrise

siltsunrise

Lurker
Hi, New here, dunno if this is the right forum.
I'm on the hunt for a new android phone for me girlfriend. Most important is the camera.
She had an iphone (boo hiss) for ages which had a great camera, which died. She bought some hu-wai or whatever on vacation and the cam quality is horrid. Terrible color and just unpleasant to look at everything she shoots.
So I just want a good quality phone that can do the basics: phone, web, gps, camera, with decent battery life.
Older and used is great. Cheap/ish is a must. Don't need fancy bells and whistles, just basic functionality and a good camera.
The camera needs a good macro, as she loves closeups of flowers and such. Gimme good color and clarity.
Thanks for any help!
 
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Well most any device camera that has 13 megapixels with a dual camera would be excellent for what you're looking for. The phones will very and the prices will also so pick and choose from a phones category of that sort.
 
I don't consider specs a good guide to quality. The spec sheet won't tell you anything about the quality of the lens, sensor or image processing, and all of those matter much more than the number of pixels when it comes to image quality. The only rule of thumb I use is that small sensor plus high pixel count is rarely a recipe for success.

However, I can't really make a recommendation because I don't really know your tastes in images, and I prefer only to recommend where I have experience of the camera, and I don't buy inexpensive phones so probably don't have relevant experience here. I'd suggest that a second-hand flagship might be better than many budget phones though, so perhaps have a look at camera samples in some reviews from the last few years and see what looks good to you.
 
Can't make a suggestion as it's pretty hard to recommend something that's so subjective as smartphone camera quality. But I would suggest that you give some serious re-thinking about that '...cheap-ish is a must' concept.
Cheap phones rely on lower-spec, lower-quality components, assembled with lessor quality-control, that's part of why they are cheap. Being pretty cheap myself I'm immersed in low-end but at the same time I recognize that paying more for quality stuff is an investment that pays for itself over time. It's not like you need to spend a whole lot getting a flagship-level phone either, just avoid the bargain-level models. (Just out of curiosity but just which model Huawei did she get?)

As an aside, this article on smartphone camera basics is a good read. It's getting a little dated (2014) but all the fundamentals haven't changed:
https://www.techspot.com/guides/850-smartphone-camera-hardware/
 
Are Nokia 808s and 1020s still available? I suppose with no support from Microsoft they couldn't be used as actual phones but if the cameras are still functional...in the meantime, are there any reasonably priced point and shoots out there? Wired had an article on this but the prices were all in the hundreds. Didn't companies such as Kodak and Polaroid used to have cameras available for maybe as low as $20? Of course, I'm sure they weren't of the highest quality, but it was possible to go out and buy one with more or less pocket change. Speaking of graphics, I'm having a weird problem with screenshots taken with Firefox and/or Irfanview. It seems that anything that's too tall to be displayed on the screen all at once gets a "border" in the middle stating the source of the image. I don't want that. I want just the picture itself. Why would anyone ruin a perfectly good pic with that, and how do I stop it?
 
Thanks. I just belatedly realized how poor the resale value of the huawei is - the market is flooded with them - and from reading amazon reviews, I'm learning that even the high end phones with great cams have many other bugs and quality issues I'm not keen to invest in; so I got to thinking, maybe I could improve the quality of her current phone's photos with another app?
Would shooting everything in raw and using some pc software to tweak them make any difference at all? Her phone is a huawei p8 lite.
I'm a noob at photography and digital cams, so pardon my ignorance.
 
Shooting in raw might make a difference if the main problem is lousy processing, provided that the phone allows writing raw in the first place. If the built-in app doesn't offer it you could try Open Camera, which should let you record raw if the phone supports it then see what you can do. But that's a much more complicated and time-consuming workflow: I do that with my DSLRs, but can't usually be bothered with a phone.

As for amazon reviews, they do suffer the same problem that you see in many places on the internet: people with a problem or complaint are far more likely to post than those who do not, and so there's a tendency for problems to be exaggerated. And that's after you disregard the reviews from people who don't own the product (some are very obvious, some will be less so), or are complaining about the seller, or about something that was actually in the product description that they didn't bother reading, or other silliness. So they are useful, but I always read them critically, and if there are only a few reviews it can be hard to judge the reality.
 
  • Suppose I invested in just a camera instead of a cellphone. What improvements could I expect from paying the same amount for a dedicated device rather than a jack of all trades? How much better would the pictures be? I assume the camera would plug into the pc the same as a phone and use some sd card.
 
Rgarner said:
  • Suppose I invested in just a camera instead of a cellphone. What improvements could I expect from paying the same amount for a dedicated device rather than a jack of all trades? How much better would the pictures be? I assume the camera would plug into the pc the same as a phone and use some sd card.
Click to expand...

A DSLR camera that costs less than half the price of an S9 will take better pictures than the best camera phone available.
 
That's good to know. How much would that cost? Where is it available? How big and clunky is it? Do you have a more specific recommendation?
 
That's a good choice, I'd also budget for a f1.8 or f1.4 50mmm prime lens, Around $300-$400 should be enough.
 
You can get some pretty good deals on second-hand flagships on Swappa.com. Look at the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Still a perfectly capable phone and has a respectable camera (Better than the iPhone at the time of its release, according to reviews). You can also look at the LG G6 (See example below). That's what I use as my daily driver. It's a pretty impressive dual camera setup. Both are available for under $200.

20180530_135825_HDR.jpg

Unfortunately, the forum software resamples large images, but if you want to see the full resolution detail i can upload a section of the original image.
 
I have made it clear my distaste for the LG G6, it's been plagued with problems. The one and only area I will give it credit for is the camera especially manual mode. You can take some incredible pictures.
 
Wow, that sounds really expensive. Maybe I'll just have to stick with a phone camera after all. Are slrs really for regular people or just professional photographers who can actually afford them? In the meantime, could I get the LG G6 and use it as nothing more than a camera? I guess that way I wouldn't have to have a contract with a carrier. Is there some way other than Swappa? I know they accept only paypal, but I don't know why.
 
SLRs are not just for professionals - few companies could survive on the pro market alone. But while you do find many people who buy SLRs and use them as point and shoot cameras they are really intended for enthusiasts: with much larger sensors and interchangeable lenses they offer more quality and flexibility than a phone ever will, but are much bigger and require investment of time and money (additional lenses) to get the most from them. In fact that's a budget SLR, and as was pointed out it's half the cost of a flagship phone (and will last far longer). You probably don't want to know how much a pro-oriented SLR costs...

The same is true when you look at dedicated fixed-lens cameras (as opposed to interchangeable lens cameras like SLRs). You can find cheap ones (though I doubt you'd like the images from a $20 camera), but the better ones will have larger sensors and better lenses, and hence will cost more. A good compact can be found second hand for less than that SLR, but it's really a matter of knowing what you are looking for to find the best within your budget.

The big advantage of a phone as a camera is that you are probably carrying it. That's the one drawback with using a G6 as a camera only: it requires you to carry it in addition to a phone, just as a dedicated camera would.
 
If you think a DSLR and lenses is too expensive and bulky ( a friend who is a very keen amateur photographer has a couple of lenses that cost over £1K. why not try a bridge camera, you get most of the advantages of a DSLR, but without interchangeable lenses. what Pros of Bridge Cameras:
  1. Much cheaper
  2. lighter and smaller than DSLR
  3. No worry about dust on the sensor
  4. Long zoom range (40x - 50x optical zoom is pretty standard, usually with a 2x 'digital zoom'
  5. Decent pixel count: 16 -24mp
  6. Manual and the usual automatic modes
  7. Some models support RAW
Cons of Bridge Cameras
  1. Manual control is not always full
  2. you don't always have a filter thread
  3. Image quality is a shade down (but comparable to a good compact

Sony alpha and the Olympus Pen are obvious examples. Cheaper than DSLR, but more than most bridge cameras.
You may be happy with an 'enthusiast compact' which offers the same functions as a bridge camera, but in a smaller format.

The best hing would be to have a look at EBay/Amazon, see what takes your fancy, check out some reviews, and take the plunge.
 
I had never heard of a bridge camera. I suppose it's called that because it provides a bridge between cameraphone and slr. What would be the low end on those? Does RAW mean just what the camera captures? If that's it, would it be possible to work with RAW by using a program such as Photoshop? I've never done that. Are there good free programs for the pc which could do that? I'm sorry for all these questions but as you can probably tell I'm far from an expert.
 
A "bridge camera" is more a bridge between a point and shoot compact and SLR (though the smartphone has eaten a lot of the point and shoot market, so between phone and SLR probably also works). Often these have lenses with a wide zoom range. Some use relatively large sensors, in which case either they will be bigger or the zoom range smaller (they'll be more expensive either way), others use smaller sensors which makes it easier to have a really big zoom range in a smallish camera. A quick search for "bridge camera" at one UK electronics retailer threw up a price range from £130 to £1,800 (no, I don't know who would pay that much for such a camera, given what else you can get for that price). Those are of course new prices, it's possible to pick up slightly older cameras second hand in good condition.

RAW means the raw sensor data, as opposed to a jpeg image created from it. Photoshop itself can't process them, but there are probably plug-ins, and there are dedicated raw convertor programs (some of which are free). Be warned that processing raw gives you control of all of the decisions the camera usually makes when creating a jpeg (the ability to adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpening, tone curves, colour temperature and many other processing choices), but that also makes the process much slower and more work than just "press the button, copy the image off the camera". Though once you've decided on a set of settings (a "profile") that suits your typical shot you can select images and process them in a batch rather than editing each one by one, and still have the option of adjusting manually if there's an image that you think would benefit. RAW files are much bigger too (they contain more information - if they didn't you'd not be able to do anything you couldn't do with a jpeg), so fill your cards and drives quicker.
 
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