The camera phone announcements from the major players just keep coming and the quality level of the device’s picture-taking capability just keeps ramping up.
Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy S series of high-end Android phones for the US market at a press event in NYC late last month. The phone will have different names depending on carrier: the Captivate for AT&T, the Epic 4G for Sprint, the Vibrant for T-Mobile, and the Fascinate for Verizon.
Lots of bells and whistles on the communication front for this one but we’ll, of course, take a closer look at its imaging capability.
The Galaxy S includes a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera and LED flash along with Samsung’s most advanced camera software to date that includes touch-to-focus, face detection, smile detection, and blink detection.
There's also an advanced automatic panorama “sweep” mode. As you sweep, a green box and yellow arrows help you line up the next photo, and as soon as it's lined up, it automatically takes the photo and you just keep moving the phone to take the whole panorama. When finished, it stitches them all together automatically.
Along with the phone's GPU capabilities, it can encode and decode 720p video at 30 frames per second, meaning HD video can be captured and displayed smoothly.
The Galaxy also features Bluetooth 3.0, a first in the US, along with Wi-Fi 802.11n plus DLNA for streaming that aforementioned HD video to your HD TV wirelessly. There’s also a memory card slot and GPS navigation.
