HTC Droid Incredible:
From a features standpoint, the Incredible's camera takes the cake, offering an incredible amount of customizable options including meters that let you adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness, all in real time. The Incredible also offers a ton of effects, including Sepia, Solarize, Posterize, and more.
Most impressive, however, is the actual manual control you are allowed if you happen to be photo geeks like us. If you want it, full control is yours. This includes control of ISO, white balance, resolution output, and a heap of other awesome features usually only reserved for the latest, full blown point and shoot cameras. On paper, it's one of only two phones that sports an 8 MP camera-three up from the rest in case you're planning on printing larger-than-normal images.
Samsung Epic 4G:
The Epic 4G is an impressive phone with an impressive camera. The flash in particular performed admirably, even in low light scenarios. A common problem for many phone cameras (and point and shoots) when shooting in low light is the censor often has difficulty speaking to the flash, often resulting in washed out images that are far too lit.
The Epic also offers a pretty broad range of camera features and customizable options-you can manually set the ISO, use light metering (a feature often reserved for digital SLR cameras), and adjust white balance and resolution settings, to name a few options. It also comes pre-loaded with four effects, which is appreciated, but not nearly as many as the HTC Incredible.
Finally, without a doubt, the Epic has the best looking in-camera screen of all of the phones in the test, hands down, bar none.
iPhone 4:
I'm probably just preaching to the choir at this point, but I'll say it anyway: It's really simple to use. In fact, it's the simplest of all the phones to load up the camera, and also features the snappiest auto focus sensor we tested.
We did, however, run into a few problems with the built in flash that we'll talk about during the comparison, and, like the BlackBerry, there's only a limited amount of customizable options. The lack of options is partially saved, though, by an HDR mode that actually works pretty well under the proper lighting conditions.
BlackBerry Torch:
The BlackBerry's camera capabilities, much like the phone itself, can be pretty impressive but kind of frustrating to use. On the plus side, the Torch comes with a huge range of scene modes, including face detection, Potrait, Landscape, and even more obscure environmental settings like Snow and Beach modes. Speaking of environments, the Torch did a phenomenal job recognizing shifts in the environment when the scene mode was set to Auto-it alerted us when we were in an environment with low light, for example.
Unfortunately, the customization sort of ends there. There's hardly any manual control offered at all. This didn't used to matter, but with the recent upswing in mobile camera technology, manual customization becomes a desirable option.
Motorola Droid X:
Far and away the largest phone in the roundup, the Droid X is the only other phone in this roundup that also includes an actual shutter button, which, when coupled with the massive 4.3 inch display, makes for a very solid feeling camera, and also is easy on the eyes thanks to the massive screen. The Droid X camera also has a pretty decent amount of features, offering seven effects, eight ‘scenes' (portrait, landscape, sports, etc) and a controllable flash.
Unfortunately, it lacks much of the manual control and abilities of its Droid based competition, the Incredible, but it's still the only other phone in this roundup that matches it at 8 megapixels.
Motorola Droid 2:
The Droid 2's camera settings are identical, feature for feature, to the Droid X. We're figuring that's because they were released around the same time and made by the same company, but there is one puzzling difference: The Droid X features an 8 MP camera, while the Droid 2 features a 5 MP camera.
