Camera Phones Plaza

Why limit yourself to only 100 songs? Sony Ericsson answers that question with the Walkman phone series that can load up a lot more tracks than Motorola's iTunes phones. And the latest Walkman phone in the US, the Sony Ericsson W810i can handle even more than the previous Walkman model the W600i.

The W810i package includes a 512MB Memory Stick Duo card and is compatible with cards up to 2 GB. It has great phone reception, a bright and colorful 1.9” LCD, integrated Bluetooth 2.0 and an FM radio. The slimmed-down candy bar body is much smaller, more mainstream and more attractive than the W600i. And it’s got a 2 megapixel camera that takes even better photos than the Sony Ericsson S710a and comes close to the Nokia N90 on occasion.

It might not seem fitting to chat so much about the camera on the W810i is when the phone is billed as a Walkman music phone. But the 2.0 megapixel built-in camera is one of the best we’ve seen on a phone currently sold on the US market with a sharp lens and software that give you very high quality photos. The camera software’s user interface will make sense to most anyone, even if he or she never read a word in the manual.

The built-in camera has a relatively large lens (AF 4.8mm 1:2.8) with two bright flash bulbs above and an orange colored self-portrait mirror below. You can launch the camera by either going into Menu/Camera or by holding down on the camera shutter button. The camera uses the W810i screen as the viewfinder and has two soft keys for viewing photos/videos and changing settings. The settings are easy to follow and you can personalize the settings in all features the camera has to offer.

You can take photos up to 1632 x 1224 which is higher resolution than the W600i and the S710a’s 1.3 MP cameras. The lens has auto-focus feature, and you can zoom in and out by using the volume up and down button when in the camera mode. You can take normal still pictures or panorama photos by turning on the Panorama mode. The panorama mode allows you to take a series of pictures and stitch them together.

You can select macro mode for close-up shots, night mode for low-light conditions; you’ve a self-timer, special effects (black & white, negative, sepia and solaria), white balance settings (auto, daylight, cloudy, fluorescent and incandescent), picture quality settings, shutter sounds, time and date stamps and options to save the photos to the internal memory or the Memory Stick. All options are easy to access and quick to change.

Read full review here.