Samsung Galaxy Tab - Camera Performance - Samsung Galaxy Tab

Samsung Galaxy Tab - Camera Performance

The Galaxy Tab comes with two cameras - a rather pedestrian 3.2 megapixel rear shooter and a VGA front facing camera. On the good side, this is two more cameras than the iPad. On the bad side, both are pretty mediocre.

Let me explain. The rear camera fares reasonably well in outdoor lighting and indoor areas with lots of natural light, and compressed to web resolutions they look great. Look at the native resolution photos and you’ll see a lot of fuzziness. Things get even worse when you start shooting purely on artificial light - there’s a lot of visible noise even at web resolutions, and the pictures are painful to look at up close. For a midrange phone camera, that’s about as expected, but I wish that Samsung would have spent a little bit more and given the Galaxy Tab a higher end camera.

Outdoor shot taken at 1:45pm in an Audi dealership parking lot. Note the brand new A8.

Indoor shot taken in my extremely messy house. Note the grainy quality, also seen in some of the other indoor shots.

Your humble narrator, taken with the self potrait camera.

The front facing camera has the same issues with indoor lighting, but otherwise functions normally for video calling and “Facebook profile” self-portraits.

HD video recording is sadly not supported, the Galaxy Tab only shoots at 720 x 480. However, the video is actually pretty decent quality, as you can see in the sample below. No re-encoding, just a straight upload to YouTube.

  

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