C510. First impressions and photo test

Today I wanna present you mini-review, called “fist impressions”, of the new Sony Ericsson C510. In my mini-review I will concentrate mainly on the photo-functions. Also on the end of the article you will find some photo-examples from C510 and comparison with the K790i. Don’t forget to click on the link “Read more” to view full mini-review of of the Sony Ericsson C510.

Design and materials

The phone is looking damn good, at the moment I get it, I decided to make a photo of it on the stylish black paper-folder. Very good looking.

The back of the phone is soft-touch plastic, that’s good to me, phone will not jump-off from the hands.

There is some gap between top of the body and the screen, that increases phone design and that’s looking pretty good.

The screen is fine, 2.2 inches, produces pretty good colors and contrast, yet the C902 looks better with more warm colours and looks sharper due to its screen size (2.0 inches).

The construction is good, solid. Looks like Sony Ericsson seriously takes-up on materials.

The lens-cover opens pretty original, it comes up and back, and then slides back. Better to push the lens cover from the top of the full body, sliding it back. The Cyber-shot™ inscription and small arrow on the lens cover is tactile, so the lens cover opens up pretty comfortable.

Keyboard is also fine, I felt no problems with D-pad or functional keys.

Due to the screen position from the top of the body, the keypad shrinks a little, and the gaps between keys is decreased. But still, the keypad is fine, the buttons are soft and comfortable to press. One minute – and I was able to enter the text with no need to look at the keypad at all, using the T9 text input.

The design is taking some recall from my memories, and finally I understand, what it reminds me. The C702 Cyber-shot™ phone! Screen position, D-pad, reminds me of C702. Later, I found out that the phone looks like C702 not only in that…

Inside

The A2 platform, so common, but it has some tasty changes.

1. The platform speed. Very good, the menus navigation is fast.

2. Text input. While tapping in some text, there are small icons under the text-input area. So you don’t need to use an Option softkey to insert picture or emoticon. The emoticons kit became wider. Still, I don’t understand, what are the emoticon animals? Bears, or mice? Help me with that, please.

3. The sms-chat mode. Very fun and comfortable. There’s no longer need to jump from folder to folder to find-out, why do I have such an angry message in my Outbox folder

The sms-chat mode helps to reveal all the emotions of the sms conversation. Bravo, this is pretty handy mode.

4. Accelometer. Works as fast as the phone interface at all. It’s easy to catch up, for example, with Maze.swf flash-file, which was uploaded on the http://semcblog.com/ in the post about C510 and W705 content.

Running inside the interface is fast, the platform is stable. No more words. The phone interface is the same as C905‘s.

Photo test

The photo capabilities of the phone it’s first-place important to me, so, without any thoughts in my head, I’ve grasped the old, barely-breathing, and – for real – RUSTY K790i and have decided to make some competition to find out, how the photo-technologies have risen up after all of this time.

Here, I should remind something about cameraphones.

1. Exposure time. The shorter it is, the sharper picture will be taken. In low-light conditions, exposure time becomes longer, so you have to stand still to take the crisp picture.

2. ISO level. More ISO means more noise (this also depends on the camera module, of course). In low-light conditions, the ISO becomes higher, so the photos become noiser and blurry.

You wonder, why am I talking so much about low-light conditions?

This is because for the human eye the light conditions may seem to be good, but it is not so for the cameraphone.

If you noticed slow screen-reaction on your C510 while tracing the object, you wish to snap, you should understand – it means that for the phone – it’s low-light conditions around.

Picture #1. Indoor picture. Pretty good light conditions, I should say it was. C510 snaps with 1/13s exposure time. That’s pretty bad, I should say. K790i takes 1/25 easily. The C510 picture has a lot of noise – it’s clear to me, because the K790i has strong noise-reduction. But strange – anyway, details in the K790i photo are very good. The C510 ISO – 125, K790i ISO – 200. But still, more ISO doesn’t make the K790i picture noiser.

Picture #2. Outdoors. Must have. Of course, the quality is good here. But still – 1/250 against 1/400. Strange? The same ISO, though. The detail level in the C510 photo is poor, comparing with K790i, it’s obvious. Contrast between the sky and the trees eats-up the edges and there is some chromatic noise there. C510 is obviously not a winner here. Let’s jump to the next one!

Picture #3. Indoors again. Macro-shots were always good with Sony Ericsson cameraphones. Let’s look at the exposure time. Again, C510 – 1/5 second (!!!!), K790i – 1/13 second. It should make us think a little. The C510 is better to take blurried pictures, that’s not good. The ISO level in the C510 picture is lower than K790i‘s. Looks like C510 is afraid to produse very much noise.

Picture #4. Low-light with no flash. 1/5 against 1/8. The same ISO level. The C510 details are poor. It’s obvious while looking at the photos with your own eyes.

Picture #5. Low-light with flash. That’s just for fun and to look at the exposure time – as you know, K790i has a xenon flash, not LEDs like C510.

So we have 1/10 here, ISO 640. Also we have some noise-reduction performed by C510. Not bad. Let’s not compare with the K790i photo. Crazy 1/250 exposure time in low-light conditions is something that C510 wouldn’t be happy to know about.

You have to shake K790i like hell to get the bad picture with such a short exposure time.

So the xenon flash is not important due to its luminosity – it’s important due to high exposure time while shooting with it in low-light conditions.

Picture #6. Important case – photos of the text. Specially for that, Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot™ cameraphones are pumped up with the “Document” shooting mode. So we first make photos WITHOUT this mode, and then with it, to find out how this mode could help us. So there is the result. The text is readable, even if this is so small font size. C510 is something weaker, if we look at the top of the picture, where sooooo tiny text is located. But – to catch up the text, the C510 camera is surely capable.

Picture #7. And now the “Document” mode. What do we got here. Contrast is increased (so tight, that some areas become not readable at all. Both exposure times and ISO levels are something like previous test; that’s the post-filter of the “Document” mode what is interesting here. Everybody should look at all of that things and decide to use this Document mode or not.

Picture #8. I don’t see any sense to continue comparing K790i and the C510 cameraphones, so now just the C510 photos. This one was taken from the moving car. Don’t laugh about what kind of maniac I should be to take photos from the racing car. This is not the point. Look at the photo – good light conditions, low ISO but….1/40 exposure time. That means that even in good light you can face some troubles in taking good pictures with your C510 cameraphone. So now we should stop to drink alcohol to prevent our hands shaking, and ask people to stand still!

Picture #9. Good light conditions. Take a look at the solid colour areas, like the road. There is some kind of grid-like noise we could previously see in C702 pictures. It seems to me that camera modules are not so different….

Picture #10. A night shot with awful light conditions. The standard mode performs so badly. The night mode performs much good. Standard mode shoot-out at 1/10s, ISO 640. Everything is kinda green, creepy, noisy and so on. The file size in standard mode is 808Kb. The night-mode one – 176Kb!!! Why is that I don’t know. Let’s look at the exposure time in night-mode photo. 1/2 second (K790i night mode makes 1/2s, too). So you have to stand still for whole half a second to take good pictures. Strange that ISO is only 100. Anyway, we can see details in the picture. But we should remember that 1/2s – is a very long exposure time..

Picture #11. Extra! So – pretty good, isn’t it? Because of the bright light conditions.

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Looking at the photos in my PC I have constant feeling that pictures all were taken with C702..

Why did I make this kind of test? Why did I take old rusty K790i as a competitor?

By these tests, everyone can imagine, how his/her photo will look like.

And K790i is so old phone, so we should see some increased quality in the new Cyber-shot™, even if it stands some lower in the whole Sony Ericsson lineup.

Conclusions on the C510 camera? C510 is non-expensive cameraphone from Sony Ericsson. The most non-expensive. So no one will put good camera in it. So we got the same C702 camera. But in the C702 photos with flash there was too mush yellow color. Here, in C510, that’s fixed.

Good feature is ability to turn-off the LED while focusing. Good thing we got shortcuts at the keypad.

Video mode – QVGA, 30 frames per second, pretty smooth movement capture. The sound – mono, 16kHz, 16bit. The same as C702‘s (C902 and C905 take stereo, 32kHz 16bit sound).

So good that we have Smile-Shutter and Face-Detection functions. But what should we do when the light around us is poor? Our smiling friend will freeze and wait, until we take a photo? In good-light conditions these functions will be usable.

In average light conditions, the on-screen viewfinder starts to act sooo slow. When it happens, it means we have to prepare for long exposure times and for hands-so-still-like-tripod stand.

So the C510 is average shooter. We have no xenon flash here, if we want to, we can buy C901.

Maybe that in future firmwares will be some changes and photo quality will rise up. But can firmwares put another, good camera-sensor? No major changes we could expect in camera quality. We will face the same hell-long exposure times.

A girl came up, and tried to take a photo of herself with C510. No way, she got blurry photo. 1/15. Maybe I am so boring, maybe everybody uses cameraphones at the sunny beaches, and nobody takes party-shots? Maybe.

In the summer time, or in good-light conditions, C510 camera will perform well. But that’s all. But hey, that’s enough about photo.

Final words

So that’s all I have to say. The camera is not so good as I’ve expected, but is that the camera what matter in the Cyber-shot™ phone?

Shortly, the C510 camera is the same thing we’ve got in the C702.

But at all, C510 is very good non-expensive phone. Pretty good for current Sony Ericsson lineup. Pretty pleasing phone.

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