Samsung F110 miCoach adidas camera samples

The Samsung F110 miCoach adidas phone is geared up primarily with top quality coaching software, and has a well-integrated music player onboard. It's an ideal training partner, but its camera capabilities are more modest. The miCoach has a 2-megapixel camera on its back panel, with no flash or photo light illumination to speak of.

It does have a dedicated camera key on the side of the phone, which swiftly fires up the shooter and is used as a capture button when holding the phone in landscape mode. It's quite handy if you want to take snaps quickly without messing about - maybe when you're out running.

In fact, one unique element of the Samsung F110's camera facilities is the ability to allocate snaps to individual workouts as visual labels, and there's a separate image folder for miCoach photos. You can make a visual record of all your runs, and store it within the miCoach application.

When launched, the screen immediately switches to landscape orientation, so the full screen becomes the viewfinder, with setting control icons lined up accordingly. The F110's screen resolution is a limited 176x220 pixels, which means you don't get the most detailed presentation of images, but it's perfectly adequate for framing snaps.

With a 2-megapixel camera without autofocus or flash, shooting quality is limited too; , the 1600x1200 pixels top image size is what you'd expect as a minimum camera spec for all but the most basic of new cameraphones in 2008.

Samsung has included a digital zoom, and a selection of automatic metering system adjustments to optimise shooting, should you wish to make the most of the camera. It has brightness control, some white balance settings for indoors or outdoors conditions (daylight, incandescent, fluorescent or cloudy), ISO light sensitivity adjustment (100, 200, 400), and seven image sizes (from thumbnail-sized 224x168 pixels up to the headline 1600x1200).

You can take multiple shots, mosaics and panorama shots at lower res, and add frames to pics and colour effect (black and white, negative, sepia, emboss and sketch). There's a standard timer function too, and you can pull up guidelines on the viewfinder screen to help you frame shots.

Performance
The 2-megapixel camera is capable of producing pleasant enough shots, particularly when lighting conditions are good. Colours are particularly bright, and can if anything be a touch more vibrant than you'd naturally expect. That means in subdued lighting the automatic metering system will boost colours, so images don't appear washed out. Sometimes this can appear a touch too saturated for the image but not excessively so.

The fixed focus lens doesn't provide the flexibility to focus on one part of the image, so it's pretty much point and shoot. Images aren't as sharp as we'd like, though it's about average for a 2-megapixel camera. Detail and crispness is lacking in some images, particularly where there's more subdued lighting. Indoors, the camera struggles to cope with low lighting too, and images are disappointing. If you want to print images to standard photo size, you will notice these limitations.

Exposure control was reasonable, although in some shots we experienced burning out where the camera had to deal with more complicated lighting situations. Contrast was reasonable too. There were some issues with precise rendition of bright blue sky against white sky, with some streaking.

Overall, the camera puts in acceptable, average sort of performance at this level; it's not going to win photography awards, but will take adequate snaps as you're running along.