Samsung Galaxy Tab - The AnandTech Review
by Vivek Gowri on December 23, 2010 9:48 AM ESTSamsung 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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trip1ex - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
because tablet software is made for the tablet while the software that is run on netbooks is developed for machines that are much more powerful with bigger screens and keyboards.
That's a big reason why netbooks are a crappy user experience and the experience on the iPad is a great user experience.
vld - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
How about the Archos 70 or 101 internet tablets? Direct comparison is definitely possible with the Froyo2.2 update from their web page.tipoo - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
Do they have those for testing? I'm defiantly interested in those, with Froyo and potentially Honeycomb plus jailbreaking those look like solid contenders for a much entry lower price.Rick83 - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
Got a 101 for my parents for christmas...it's certainly not in the same league as the iPad and G-Tab, but at the price it doesn't have to be. And at least you get hdmi out and a usb host (with an extra adapter on the 70).If Archos could spare 5p for some marketing, they'd be a major player.... Sadly, their finances are a bit strained....And they're French :-O
Also, I continuously fail to see why people pay laptop money for sub-netbook hardware, just because someone went and threw the keyboard away. It's pretty ridiculous....At their pricepoints the Archos tablets are sensible products - slightly more portable than a netbook, and direct interaction UIs (ie touchscreens), while priced in the same region. The expensive tabs don't do significantly more, but the extra cost is just astronomical. Even 50% more, so in the 450-500 euro/$ range would be expensive....
TareX - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
It was a nice attempt on Samsung's behalf, but I knew I would be waiting for the Honeycomb 8.9" Tegra 2 tablets instead, like the LG Optimus Pad...rs2 - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
"So what then? It’s the software. Or, to be more specific, Froyo. It’s too similar to a smartphone right now, too much of the same experience repeated on a 200% scale."...and the iPad is the same experience as the iPhone on a 400% scale. You can't place the Galaxy Tab second to the iPad just for having the same problem as the iPad.
robco - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
That would be true of the first version of the software. It was a bit of a kludge. Now we know that the iPad was actually conceived first, so you could say the iPhone is a scaled down iPad.But Apple did create a lot of new UI widgets specifically designed to take advantage of the larger screen real estate. Froyo doesn't have this. Apple released a new version of the SDK with an iPad emulator, Samsung had to put their own together without Google. I'm not holding out much hope for a good standard UI on Android either. Google is a great engineering company, but they miss out on the "soft" skills. Apple is good at both. I know Google has UI designers, but it doesn't appear that they listen to them very much. They seem to be more with Android over their other products, but that's not saying a whole lot. iOS looks clean and professional, Android does not.
I think in the end, people want a clean, polished product where the underlying technology isn't in your face, but is useful and makes it easy to get things done. MS is learning this lesson. Google needs to.
VivekGowri - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
@rs2 - if you read my software section, I said exactly that - having a scaled up OS never held the iPad back, so it's not something I can hold against the Galaxy Tab. What I can hold against the Galaxy Tab is that there are basically no apps, first party or otherwise, that take advantage of the larger screen size, other than the three or four apps that Samsung put in afterwards (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, etc). Apple basically changed every core app on the iPad to use that screen real estate, and they had more than a few high profile 3rd party apps out for the iPad - ABC player, NYT, BBC, etc etc. I don't doubt that Google will get there, probably with Honeycomb, but until then, it's a legitimate problem.Rick83 - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
Actually, there are both screen size and resolution variables that apps can read and adopt to, which only recently have been expanded to cover up to 10" (in 2.3) and 7" (in 2.2).So the issue with the apps is just a matter of time.
Also, tablets are much like TVs: consumption devices. You set the channel/insert your media and lean back. (Unless you belong to the group of idiots that mistake the devices for portable gaming systems...) In this scenarion UI scaling isn't as important as it may seem. Actually, even on my 5" 800x480 tablet, individual features are very small, and I prefer the easier reading on the big screen of the Samsung.
Voldenuit - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
>I’m not much of a Swype guyHeretic!!!~ :P