Megapixel War

When the first 5mp camera phones came out, we said that was the ultimate. Now Samsung introduces its 12 megapixel Pixon 12

For Samsung purists, Pixon 12 is not a new phone, it’s the Pixon M8800 redone. Which means no Optical Zoom (I wonder why they haven’t got this fixed till now), but the good part is that the camera will now allow you to take videos at full 30 fps at a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels. The lens is a 28 mm wide-angle lens.

The screen is a large 3.2” Amoled screen with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, so it’s good fun using this outdoors in the sun. The 480 x 800 pixel resolution on the screen allows sharp images. The overall feel of the Pixon is a bit chunky, but the 120 gm phone actually feels good to hold in your hand. There is a dedicated camera button. In addition, the Wide and Tele (zoom buttons) now have a ‘W’ and a ‘T’ printed on it, to make it feel more like a camera. The shutter switch allows a half press to do focus adjustment and then you can click a picture just like your digital camera.

The phone has a micro SD card slot on the outside. On the front, there are only two keys for end call and accept call, with a D pad in the centre. Sadly, Samsung has still not put a 3.5 mm jack on the phone and it needs a special adapter before you can plug in your standard jack earphones. The media card can be a maximum of 16 GB that will allow you to shoot a lot of pictures. I was unable to take a print of the image so can’t comment on the picture quality. The Pixon 12 also supports video calling (you will need 3G services for this).

The camera supports Geotagging, using the inbuilt GPS and has a 16x digital zoom, a dual power LED flash and an advanced shake reduction. The phone is a Quad Band phone and has a good speakerphone, with a 5.1 virtual channel surround sound technology. The camera can work without a Sim card (in offline mode). The Talk time rating is 4.5 hours.

I will not want to use this for a business phone—the browser, email client, RSS feed reader are rather unimpressive.

However, if you click a lot of pictures and don’t want to carry two devices, this is a good phone to buy.

Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He also blogs at TheBigGeek.com

12 MPcamera phoneSamsung