Blackberry Storm 9530 Review

The Storm comes with a CCD-based 3.2MP camera with LED flash.  I use mine as a flashlight, principally, but the camera does take noteworthy photos as well.  The flash briefly fires for auto-focus as well, making your subjects wince and seem like they’re all in pain in every shot.  At 3.2MP, the shots appear crisp and clear, with very little apparent noise (compared to most cell cameras I’ve seen) and  excellent depth of focus, although it’s dreadfully slow.  It also suffers from the all-too-common white balance deficiencies present in underpowered cameras, so the flash tends to wash out any semblance of normal color when used without adequate ambient lighting, but I’ve found that it corrects for the final product by and large pretty well.  The zoom is horrid, though – 2X digital, so close in for best effect and those psuedo-macro shots.  Oh, and enjoy the gesture-based control for the zoom.

Although the ISO is indicated, it’s erratic at best and useless at worst – I’ve had the phone for over a month and in only a single instance it read something other than 200 (it read 1000, and I’m not keen to believe it either); on a fancy toy like this, the camera should come with something approaching ISO adjustment.  You can play with the white balance, JPEG granularity, image size, and color effects, but that’s about it.  Nice additions: image stabilization and geo-tagging!  I have yet to use GPS with my pictures, but it’s a nice feature.

Note to mobile and hand-held developers: if you want to include a camera, make sure it is a quick one – in this day and age, if I press the capture button and then have to give it 5 seconds to finish auto-focusing and capturing what I was pointing at, you’ve done something very wrong.  Let me be clear: I expect the same performance from my pricey cell phone’s camera that I would get from your average $120 point-n-shoot, or better.  If, for a quarter of the price of my fancy phone, I can go out and get a camera that takes photos at 4 times the resolution and upwards of five times faster, with more features and a better flash, why exactly are you including a camera on my new device at all?  Get it right or leave it out!  Yes, auto-focus is nice – but not when it takes more than a second; if you can’t get it done in that timeframe, it doesn’t belong on any camera I would use for real enjoyment.