Samsung Tocco F480 camera samples

As well as being a rather stylish touchscreen mobile, the Samsung Tocco F480 is also a well equipped cameraphone, sporting a 5-megapixel camera on its elegant brushed metal back panel.

It's capable of taking detailed shots, at maximum 2560x1920 pixels resolution, that can be blown up for good quality regular photographic prints. In addition, the Tocco has a secondary front-facing low resolution camera for face-to-face video calls.

The 5-megapixel camera used on the Tocco has an impressive set of features. It has a sophisticated autofocus system inside, with additional face detection technology for automatically picking out faces in a busy scene, and a Smile Shot function, which is supposed to takes snaps only when it detects a smile.

The Tocco has an LED photo light rather than the more powerful xenon camera-style flash now starting to appear on higher end cameraphones. Its other features are nonetheless extensive for a cameraphone. There's an image stabiliser to eliminate hand wobble, and  a wide rage of settings adjustments for tweaking the automatic metering for various lighting conditions and shooting environments.

Features
The Tocco is geared up for shooting like a regular camera, with a side button to activate the camera which becomes a capture button when the camera fires up. In camera mode, the Tocco automatically swicthes into landscape shooting, with the 2.8-inch touchscreen viewfinder also taking care of camera controls.

Samsung has done some good work with the camera user interface. It's easy and generally intuitive to operate. It's touchscreen operated, with large icons for available options appearing onscreen for a few seconds after tapping the display.

The screen isn't cluttered with options; you start with the main ones along the bottom - Mode (camera, scene, camcorder), Settings (general settings), photo album and back, plus exposure and zoom sliders on the side. Pressing one of the main buttons takes you into further well-spaced sets of icons, which you can scroll down if necessary for more button options.

The camera interface works well for finger tapping, so you can select quickly and easily rather than hunting for options buried deep in menus.

The Modes menu's scenes option allows you to adjust settings to optimise shooting for different situations (portrait, sports, sunset, dawn, beach/snow, night shot). Within the settings menu, you can make plenty of changes. The shooting mode gives you access to multiple shots, panorama shots, a mosaic shot option, shooting with 'fun' frame - and the Smile shot option. The Smile Shot option is interesting and seemed to work most times, though not 100%; it's one you may want to try out but not use every time.

Other settings options include image shooting size (six options from 5-megapixels down to QVGA (320x240 pixels), flash (on/off/auto), timer (3, 5 or 10 seconds), colour effects (sepia, negative, black and white), face detection, white balance (auto, daylight, incandescent, fluorescent and cloudy), and viewfinder mode (with grid lines or icons on/off).

Further more detailed adjustments are possible too, with Wide Dynamic Range options (to boost perfomance in tricky lighting conditions), anti-shake option, choice of exposure metering, ISO settings, and picture quality.

Performance
We found that the Samsung Tocco's 5-megapixel camera was capable of producing some impressively detailed shots that looked great blown up. Richly detailed high res 2560x1920 pixels shots are not  presented to best effect on the phone's QVGA (320x240 pixels) screen; to really appreciate the performance, copy to a PC, where you'll be able to see the finer detail and colour performance this camera is capable of.

While there's no macro/close-up mode marked separately in the features rundown, the autofocus system takes care of this automatically, with exceptionally detailed, sharply focussed close-up shots possible.

Generally, shooting is of a high quality when lighting conditions are good, though the auto metering system copes well when lighting drops off, and exposure is handled very well. Colour rendition is bright and natural, with complex tones - such as dull skies - well rendered too. Images aren't quite as stunning as the very best 5-megapixel cameraphones we've seen, but are very acceptable.

Low-light shooting indoors and outside in dark conditions are limited by the LED flash performance. Illumination range is short and flash light in-fill doesn't look as precise and effective as an equivalent xenon flash. In lower light image quality can be less impressive, and in dark situations, shots can be grainy.

The cameras processing time from shutter press to image capture takes a couple of seconds, so its sometimes tricky to nail moving subjects precisely.

Nonetheless, although it's not right up with the very best cameraphones, this 5-megapixel cameraphone is still capable of some fine quality imaging.