Samsung Droid Charge Review - Droid Goes LTE

Camera Performance

The Charge includes an 8 MP rear facing camera with single LED flash, and perhaps most notably a front facing 1.3 MP camera. For comparison, the LG Revolution has a 5 MP rear camera and 1.3 MP front, and the Thunderbolt has an 8 MP rear.

The camera on the Charge isn’t overwhelmingly good, just above average. The Charge appears to have a shorter focal length than the Fascinate (and thus Galaxy S), and has slightly better white balance on the rear camera. Autofocus happens with the LED turned on, and in the dark the Charge performs pretty well. The front facing camera looks like a smartphone camera from two years ago, like it probably is. It’s a fixed focus optical system that seems to have a very close hyperfocal length, and thus still works fine for close-up things like a face for video chatting. Front facing camera quality is par for right now. 

We’ve done the usual thing and taken comparison photos in the lightbox with a small test scene. Our camera bench is going to change slightly - moving and construction at the test site has made locations 1, 2, and 5 inaccessible, and 6 is next due to some construction that’s just getting started. We’re going to standardize things shortly between the whole team, but just a quick heads up that this is why 1, 2, and 5 are missing for the Droid Charge. The Charge also has the same standard fare camera application as the Galaxy S series, and I don’t think it’s really worth going over again since nothing is changed. 

Video on the Droid Charge is recorded in 720P 30fps MPEG-4 baseline with 1 reference frame at 12.0 Mbps, with a single channel 60.9 Kbps AAC audio stream on the rear camera, and at VGA 15fps MPEG-4 with 1 reference frame at 1.5 Mbps with the same audio stream on the front camera.

Video on the Charge is actually pretty good quality wise. There’s continual autofocus going on and doing its job in the video, not too much wind noise, and nice detail in high spatial frequencies. I should note that the Charge actually records 720P at a higher bitrate than some smartphones do 1080P video recording, and as a result things look nice here. 

The front facing camera flips things horizontally and looks about as good as you’d expect VGA to look. It isn’t super stellar, but it’s adequate for video chats. As usual we’ve uploaded videos both to YouTube and in their original form to the AT servers for your enjoyment.