How to buy the best camera phone

Buying the best camera phone isn’t just a case of choosing one with the most megapixels. As any camera buff will tell you, megapixels are only half the story. To help you choose the best camera phone for you, we’ve put together this short buying guide. You’ll learn what makes for a quality camera phone, what features are essential for good pics, and what other extras are available that make camera phones so much more fun than standalone digital cameras!

Plus we answer the question: is the best camera phone really as good as a digital camera?

Find out how you can buy the best camera phone for your needs…

Six essential camera phone features

The first thing you need to do when choosing your camera phone is to fix your budget. Once you know how much you can spend, you can work out what camera phones are available to you. Then whittle the list down by making sure your choices have the following six essential features.

1. Autofocus

Autofocus makes the camera focus on your subject correctly and can help avoid blurred shots. If you want photos you can actually use, you need autofocus. It doesn’t matter how many megapixels a phone has, without autofocus, your photos will look ghastly.

This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many camera phones don’t have autofocus. Don’t assume – make sure your camera phone does.

2. Dual LED or Xenon flash

Given that most photos from a camera phone are taken in low light conditions (i.e. pubs and clubs, ready for the ritual Facebook humiliation the next day!), a high quality flash is essential. Standard LED flashes just won’t cut it, as they throw out less light than your camera’s screen!

The best type of flash is Xenon, which produces a much brighter burst of light that helps your camera phone take good pics even in the dark. The downside is that it’s quite heavy on the battery, and it takes time to reset, so the time between shots is increased.

In between lies the Dual LED flash. Twice as bright as normal LED flash, but 1/1000th that of Xenon, it does have the advantage of being able to run continuously, so can be used for video as well as still photos. It’s also cheaper than Xenon, too.

Here’s a summary of the different types of flash:

Xenon
Pros: Brightest by far, produces the best quality low light pics, photos are less blurred
Cons: Expensive, heavy on the battery, no good for video

Dual LED

• Pros: Twice as bright as standard LED flash, cheaper than Xenon, acceptable low light pics, great for video
• Cons: Not a patch on Xenon for stills, photos of moving images can be blurred

Single LED Flash

• Pros: Cheap
• Cons: Useless!

To see the difference yourself, check out these three photos taken by Steve Lichfield of AllAboutSymbian using different flashes:

Photo taken with a Xenon Flash:

Photo taken with a Dual LED Flash:

Photo taken with a Single LED Flash:

See, a picture really does paint a thousand words!

3. White Balance, Exposure and Preset Scene Modes

If you prefer taking pics outside in the glorious sunshine (i.e. not in Britain!), you’ll need a camera phone that lets you tweak white balance or exposure settings. Over-exposed shots will tend to look completely washed out, with a blue sky looking almost white. Being able to control white balance will reduce the effect.

It can be tricky to get good quality results, though, so having a good range of presets will do as an alternative. Look for as many different presets as possible. At the very least, your camera phone should include the following:

• Cloudy
• Sunny
• Incandescent – use indoors with tungsten filament bulbs
• Fluorescent – use indoors when fluorescent lighting is being used

Top-end camera phones, such as the Sony Ericsson Satio, also include modes such as portrait, landscape, sport, and even beach and snow! The more presets there are, the easier it will be to capture good quality pics.

4. Image stabilization

As with auto-focus, image stabilization is essential if want photos that aren’t blurred. Camera phones are notorious for producing poor results because they’re placed on a tripod and the camera taker (i.e. you) is rarely sober when taking the pic!! The result is a shaky hand taking blurry pics.

Image stabilization can’t prevent blurred pics completely, but it can do a great job of reducing the blur. If you want good quality pics, make sure some from of image stabilization is listed in the specs.

See top-rated camera phones with image stabilization.

5. Mobile Phone gizmos

A camera phone is not just a camera – it’s also a phone (no, really!), which means you cna upload your pics to loads of different picture sharing sites, as well as to social network sites such as Facebook.

For this to be practical, though, your camera phone needs three key features:

1. Fast Internet connection. At least Wi-Fi and 3G, but with cameras that are 8 megapixels+ you need HSDPA as well. This gives you much faster data transfer speeds, which is what you need when you increase the megapixels, as the resultant pictures take up a lot of space.
2. Built-in support for image sharing Web sites – at the least, your phone will need built-in apps for Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. The easier it is for you to upload your pics, the more you’ll use these services.
3. An easy to use user interface – if the phone is difficult to to use, you won’t bother uploading your pics.

You might also want automatic geo-tagging, which stamps the location of the shot as well as the time and date that it was taken, but this is essenital if it’s a feature you particularly need.

Other mobile phone features, such as picture editing, tend to be gimmicky at best – there’s only so much editing you can do on a 3″ screen! – so don’t worry about these. Equally, camera-specific extras such as red-eye reduction and smile detection are a nice bonus to have, but they’re not essential. Many online photo editors, such as Picnic, will let you remove red eye easily after you’ve taken the shot.

See top-rated camera phones with great Web site and social network features.

6. Megapixels

I’ve deliberately left megapixels till last, as people obsess about them too much. A good quality 3 megapixel camera with the essentials listed above will take much better pics than a poor quality 8 megapixeller.

That said, as a baseline, you should look for 5 megapixels as a minimum if it’s good quality pics you’re looking for. Any smaller than this, and your pcitures simply won’t be able to capture enough detail. They’ll be ok, but not exactly great. And remember, if you’ve found a 5 megapixel camera phone, but it doesn’t have the other 5 features above, simply avoid it!

Going up the scale, 8 megapixels has become more common in 2009, while Sony Ericsson and Samsung now have 12 megapixel camera phones in the shape of the Sony Ericsson Satio and the Samsung Pixon 12. Both of these phones are pitched as high-end camera phones and so have a wealth of camera-related extras, making either of them excellent choices.

Whether you need 12 megapixels, though, depends on what you want to do with your camera phone. If you’re looking for perfect pics, you’d be better off with a digital camera. However, the newer 12 megapixel camera phones are at least as good as low end camera phones from a few years ago, so if that’s the level of quality you’re after, then the 12 megapixellers will do you nicely.

See the latest top-rated high megapixel camera phones.

The minimum set of features you need for a great camera phone

The following list summarizes the minimum set of features you should look for in order to get a great quality camera phone:

• 8 megapixels (5 at a pinch)
• auto-focus
• image stabilization
• a nice range of preset scene modes (and the more manual control you have over exposure and white balance settings, the better)
• xenon or dual LED flash
• good quality optics
• fast Internet connection
• easy to use interface

But what phones have all of this in them? Worry not, we’ve come up with what we think are the best camera phones for 2009, each of which contains at least these features :)