The camera on the Evo is simply amazing. The 8MP camera offers almost every setting under the sun, with quick access by simply swiping across it’s menu arrow. Taking the time to set up your camera can allow you to capture some unbelievable images.
The camera controls are made up of a few different elements. First, to the left of the screen is the settings slider. To the right are 4 different buttons: Top – Flash (On, Auto, Off), Zoom – (In/Out via slider on left), Shutter – (to take the image) and Gallery – when pressed it takes you to your camera’s gallery. The image above was taken with the Evo’s camera of this blog posting in Windows Live Writer.
The Settings menu allows you to completely control your camera. The primary control switches between Camera Mode and Video Mode. Brightness controls the brightness setting of the image.
ISO is the ‘light sensitivity’ of the digital image. The range is similar to the ‘speed’ of film that used to be purchased back in the day of the Kodak camera. The larger the number, the more light is captured, but more ‘noise’ or grain is recorded. The ISO range on the Evo covers everything from the wonderful 100 for outdoors and bright areas, all the way to 1250 that has so much noise that it’s almost unusable.
Many people think that the bigger the megapixel, the better the images will be. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I found that using a 5MP setting delivers a wonderful quality image that will print a great 8x10 print. Be cautious of the setting on the widescreen mode, they look great on the screen, but they are not in a common printing format (5:3 would print a 10x6 or 3x5 print – not a 4x6 or 8x10.)
If you are concerned about space, you can set the quality down to low, but if you compromise, you can run that 5MP image at High quality and use about the same amount of space. I am very happy with this setting and highly recommend it.
A neat idea with the next setting, the Self Timer, is to set it for 2 seconds when shooting low light. This allows you to touch the screen, stabilize the device and then have the image be captured. This virtually eliminates the ‘shift’ that happens when you push the shutter control on screen.
The other settings found in the menu are pretty self explanatory. You have the Auto Focus – a must if you aren’t shooting super fast moving items like children. There is also Face Detection – which again slows it down, but allows a wider focus range. Shutter sound, Time stamp and Grid do exactly what they say.
The last few menu items that are accessed in the middle of the menu are the Contrast/Saturation/Sharpness controls and the Effects menu. The built in effects are None, to capture the image in color with no changes. Grayscale to shoot black and white. Sepia to give your image an antique look. Negative that reverses the colors in your image. Solarize, Posterize and Aqua are all different coloring filters that add some fun to the stock camera settings.
Hopefully by playing a bit with your settings you can start capturing some amazing images from your device. It may not be a professional level D-SLR, but it will capture life’s little moments just fine.
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