Samsung 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.

  

Samsung Galaxy Tab - Performance Samsung Galaxy Tab - Battery Life
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  • sciwizam - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    Wikipedia has:

    Dimensions 190.09 mm (7.484 in) (h)
    120.45 mm (4.742 in) (w)
    11.98 mm (0.472 in) (d)
    Weight 380 g (0.84 lb)

    These make a lot more sense.
  • VivekGowri - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    Fixed, so sorry - it got pushed live before I had a chance to edit that part.
  • medi01 - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link

    "HD video recording is sadly not supported"

    Having in mind how "huge and powerfull" are the lens "HD resolution" would make sense, wouldn't it?

    I understand, when this BS comes from usual customers, but when it comes from a reviewer, sigh...
  • VivekGowri - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link

    Why Samsung decided to spec their bigger, better device with a lower end camera than the Galaxy S phones is an openly debatable question that I have no real answer to, but it doesn't support HD video recording. What else am I supposed to say?
  • medi01 - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link

    Obviously neither HD video nor 5+ megapixels photos make any sense on devices with tiny lens.

    Whether they upscale or produce "HD" noise is completely irrelevant, mentioning "lack of HD video" as a real disadvantage reiterates the myth and confuses the customers.
  • NesuD - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    You're getting things wrong on the other comparison units as well. Droid X Nand is 8GB integrated and a 16 GB micro SD. This is a well publicized spec of the Droid X from launch. Fact checking and verification is an essential part of Journalism that seems to be slipping here at Anandtech of late.
  • VivekGowri - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link

    I copied that part of the table out of the Fascinate review, so I'll look into it. But I'd like to point out that this is literally just a spec table, don't call our journalistic integrity into question based on that alone.
  • aniallator - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    You have posted the dimensions and weight values for the iphone 4 (well those values match) all other areas of the Samsung galaxy tab hardware information appear to be correct.
  • veri745 - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    The posted dimensions have to be wrong.
  • misterjohnnyt - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link

    Listing Proper Dimensions FAIL

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