Sony Ericsson P1i: Review (Display and Camera)

Display and Camera

P1i has a very generous TFT touchscreen that supports up to 262K colors and 240 x 320 pixels resolution. Unfortunately, you can hardly use the phone outdoors in strong light, because you can only catch glimpses of the menu, numbers or letters. Otherwise, it makes a good addition to the smartphone and really helps users who need a bigger display for web navigation or emailing. You can easily compare P1i’s display to those that are usually embedded in Pocket PCs, just that SE’s smartphone supports more colors and it’s not limited to 65k colors.

Still, the display’s performance is limited by the low processor integrated and didn’t score more than a mid-level handset in benchmarks does. The only thing that can tell the user that this screen can do more is the 3D benchmark, which surpassed any expectations. There has been much talk about P1i’s camera and only positive things were said, now let’s see the actual truth about it. First of all, the 3.15 Megapixel camera can take snapshots with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels, but that is limited to 0 zoom. If you change zoom to any value, you will only be able to take pictures in VGA resolution. If you’re wondering if you can take pictures in the dark, the answer is “yes”, but all pictures have a green tint all over. Even if it’s not completely dark, you still won’t be able to get rid of the greenish dots.

When used in clear light, pictures look very sharp and have very good contrast. Just take care not to move your phone when you take a picture, because the camera module is very sensible. This is a very good example that more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean better quality. All pictures are saved in .jpeg format, while clips are saved either in 3GPP or MPEG4 format. The smarpthone can record clips with a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels at 15 fps, but if you want more fps (30) you can use any of the lower resolutions (176 x 144, 160 x 120 or 128 x 96 pixels). The length of the clips is only limited by the internal or expanded memory. Movie recording is a real downside for SE’s P1i, as the clips’ quality is very low, and the sound even worse, regardless of the recording conditions. Overall, the camera module of the smarpthone could get some improvements, especially for clip recording. As for picture quality, P1i is better than what you might expect from a business handset, on condition that you meet all the requirements for a good shooting (i.e. light).