Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will update this post with tha tinfo before uploading it to my blog. Right, here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between. This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen. again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus. still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up. So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first). my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot. one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry. my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along. maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels. I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight. I do not have this issue with my 4 year old kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. the digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x. Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there are those two new sweet ass models from Olympus that have 30x optical zoom and 2x-5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android that might be capable of doing this. But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, not night shot mode (although it does pretty good in loow light on auto!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. no option for taking panorama shots.
8. it does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. quality settings of high, fine, and normal
10. resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone. so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. the effects are interesting, none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy) they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display. I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
14. there are manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them. for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together.
15. there is a timeout of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, nor have I been able to sync any BlueTooth devices to it yet; however I have a handsfree car speakerphone with FM transmitter in the mail on its way to me, and a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming as well. So, I will have some more information on this soon. I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered a cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug, so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
While the camera does take some pretty acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a $100 point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. Here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between. This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen. again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus. still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up. So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first). my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot. one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry. my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along. maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
2b. There is a setting in the camera for standard metering modes: center, average, and spot.
2c. Also white balance modes: auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Daylight, and Cloudy.
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels. I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight. I do not have this issue with my 4 year old Kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. The digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x. Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there is that new sweet ass model from Olympus with 30x optical zoom and 5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android (there is one I saw “advertised” on AppBrain, haven’t tried it yet) that might be capable of doing this. But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, no night shot mode (although it does pretty good in low light on auto! see the fountain shot on part 2!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. No option for taking panorama shots.
8. It does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. Quality settings are fairly standard: high, fine, and normal.
10. Available resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. Widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video but not available when shooting video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. There is the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone. so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. Special effects, which are interesting to play with: none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy) they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display. I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
15. Additional settings are available, including: manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them. for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together on one.
16. The Evo does have a sleep timer of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
Some video settings include:
1. Switch camera front/rear.
2. The same white balance options of the camera.
3. The same brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings screens.
4. The same effect screens.
5. Resolutions: 720p (1280×720), WVGA (800×480), VGA (640×480), CIF (352×288), QVGA (320×240).
6. Encoding options: H.263 and MPEG4.
7. Defined recording length: 1MB, 2MB, 10 secs, 30 secs, 1 mins (yes mins), 3 mins, or unlimited.
8. Record with or without audio.
9. The same metering modes as the camera.
10. Review durations: no review, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, no limit (seconds is spelled out on this screen, but not on the recording length screen).
11. Flicker Adjustment: auto, 50 Hz, 60Hz.
12. Auto Focus: on/off
13. Face Detection: on/off
14. Shutter Sound: on/off
It seems as though they left the setting there from the camera and just made changes for the options that needed to be different.
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, I did get to sync my Hands-Free Bluetooth car speakerphone with FM transmitter to it and I have been using that quite happily for 2 days now with only one issue, it appears that the BT speakerphone goes into sleep mode after 10 minutes if you don’t hit a button, as it did to me this morning while listening to music pushed out to my car speakers via the built-in FM transmitter, even though I did receive a 5 minute call in the middle of that 10 minutes. I also have a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming in the mail that I will let you know about too.. So, I will have some more information on this soon. I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered an HDMI cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug (and I cannot find any adapters…), so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
10 seconds of the ending credits of a movie taken on my Evo in 720p – details: 3.97MB, 1280×720, 12 seconds, 9fps, 6.00000 Mbps, type:video/4gpp video MP4V-ES
a video out the front window of my vehicle while someone else was driving taken on my Evo in QVGA (the lowest quality setting) details: 0.97MB, 320×240, 9 seconds, 29fps, 800Kbps, type:video/3gpp video MP4V-ES
After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…
right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run. no good that was. both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play… 
Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list. mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff. I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted. especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)
then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them. so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm. I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night. decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore. well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.
oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC. failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs. I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging” anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know. it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides. So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.
on to the next issue that was going on…
so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training. I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated). had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… 
pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work. sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most. HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion. I sure hope WordPress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time) umm… now where was I?
oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot. Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt. Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this). it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput ) (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.)
HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.
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