Sony Ericsson W960i camera samples

The W960i has a 3.2-megapixel camera. Given the high calibre of other aspects of this phone you might expect better, but there it is. There is no lens cover, and the lens is only very slightly recessed so you’ll need to take care if you want to avoid scratches in the long term.

There is a second, front-facing camera for video calling, but it is the main camera you’ll use for most photographic activities. One of these is business card scanning, something that is becoming quite common in smartphones.

To scan a business card, first you run the scanner application – which sits not in the Multimedia group where the camera is but in the Organiser group along with the phone’s calendar, PDF reader and the like.

Then you photograph a business card and choose ‘process’. The photographed text is converted into an entry in the Contacts database. The conversion process takes a little time, and is not as accurate as some we’ve tried on other smartphones, but it still beats entering all the information from a business card by hand.

For photographic stills and video shooting the options are easily accessed. You tap a ‘settings’ button on the touch screen then use the scroll wheel to move through options and your fingertip on the touch screen to make your selection. Stubby fingered users may find they need to pull out the phone’s stylus for that last part, though.

There are settings for four lighting conditions: cloudy, daylight, fluorescent, incandescent and auto. You get few filters: black and white, sepia, solarisation and negative. The camera light is either set to ‘on’ or ‘off’ – there is no auto mode. This adds another thought process to shooting images, and one we’d always rather be able to put on auto mode some of the time.

There is a self timer but it has only one setting, which gives you about 20 seconds to amble around a shot you have framed. Here we hit a major design fault of the phone. The lanyard holder is on the left edge of the phone, the camera button on the right. If you were using the self timer you’d probably want to prop the phone up on its left edge to run round and get yourself into the frame. But you can’t prop the phone up on its left edge because of the protruding lanyard holder. Don’t Sony Ericsson ever user-test their mobiles for stuff like this?

There is also a macro mode and autofocus. Autofocus is, as usual, activated by depressing the side-mounted camera button halfway. It takes the autofocus a moment to kick in, but you know when it has because the world ‘locked’ appears on the viewfinder screen. You can then depress the camera button all the way and take your photo. You can disable autofocus if that suits your composition better.

Yes, the camera works, and we did manage to take some interesting shots. But when compared with what the rest of this mobile has to offer, it feels under-powered, which is a great pity.