I recently had the opportunity to attend the Usability Week 2010 conference in San Francisco, and conforming to my obsession to pack light, I did not bring any photographic equipment with me except my new HTC Incredible cell phone.  Relishing the chance to use a so-called 8MP camera on my mobile device, I snapped a few pictures along the way.  Overall, I like the results, especially for a cell phone lens.  All photos are straight out of the camera – absolutely no editing besides resizing the photographs to fit this web page.

This is probably my favorite shot of them all.  I was able to quickly snap this shot on my way to dinner one evening.  The lighting was perfect at the time and I could not resist capturing this view.  The sky is completely blown out, but the Incredible did a very nice job at guessing fairly accurately on the correct exposure on a potentially difficult scene.  The picture is sharp enough for my needs.

This shot was taken during lunch at high noon.  Not a particularly difficult scene for the camera to expose correctly, so it didn’t blow out the sky like it did on the first shot.  Nice color, good sharpness and more than adequate for a cell phone camera.  The detail quickly falls off, however, the further in you zoom into the image – especially the tree on the left.

Another shot at high noon.  As you can see, the camera overexposed the Nob Hill Cafe sign pretty severely, especially on the left.

One more shot, again at sunset (different day than the first shot).  Again, the phone overexposed the sky but exposed nicely the typical San Francisco urban landscape in the foreground.  The colors are nice and vivid, and the sharpness is still okay (but not great).

Conclusion

You probably won’t get one of your photos published in a magazine with the Incredible (at least not without significant post processing), but for a camera build into a cell phone with a small lens, it does fairly well.  It will probably fail most of the time in particularly tough to expose situations, but then again, most cameras fail in those situations without a knowledgeable photographer to compensate for the scene’s lighting, movement and other constraints.

This is my favorite camera in my stash – it is light-weight, takes beautiful photos, is easy to use and sufficiently fast for the kind of photography that I do.  One cannot ask for much more than that.

The camera is mainly plastic, sports relatively ancient technology and offers a pretty small rear LCD screen.  But then again, the camera is old!  But old cameras don’t mean bad cameras.  Newer photo tools will offer clearly superior technological improvements over what the D70 can offer, but remember, it’s not the tool that captures good photographs – it’s the photographer.  This camera still works well for me, and it’s my current favorite camera to grab when I need to go out shooting, want excellent quality photographs, but do not want to lug around a heavy tank of a camera (my D2h).

This camera is brutal – brutally fast, brutally rugged and brutally heavy.  I love shooting with it, but only when I want to give myself a decent upper body workout.  It’s built like a tank, can go anywhere, is ridiculously fast and never misses a beat.  By far the fastest camera that I’ve ever used.  Did I mention it is fast?

It’s only 4.1 megapixels, but remember that not all megapixels are created equal.  I’ve had exceptional results with the camera, but because the majority of my photographs hit the Internet rather than photo paper, megapixels are less of an issue for me anyway.

Bottom line: this thing is a tank.

Check out Nikon’s official D2H web site.

A reasonably-priced camera, 10MP, acceptable zoom and decent quality for online work, this is a nice little camera if you’re looking for something that can be shoved into your pocket at a moment’s notice while on the go.

For you techno-junkies, here are some specs for your excitement:

Megapixels: 10

Zoom: 4x Optical/4x Digital/16x Combined

Focal length: 5.0-20.0mm f/2.8-5.8 (35mm film equivalent: 28-112mm)

Focusing range: Normal: 1.6 ft./50cm-infinity
Macro: 0.8 in.-1.6 ft./2-50cm (W), 1.0-1.6 ft./30-50cm (T)
Digital Macro: 0.8 in. – 1.6 ft./2-50cm (W)

Viewfinder: None

LCD screen: 3.0-inch TFT color LCD with wide viewing angle (PureColor LCD II)
Supports 230,000 pixels

Maximum aperture: f/2.8 (W) – f/5.8 (T)

Shutter speed: 15-1/1600 sec

ISO sensitivity: Auto, High ISO Auto, ISO 80/100/200/400/800/1600 equivalent (Standard output sensitivity. Recommended exposure index)

Metering: Evaluative*, Center-weighted average, Spot**
* Control to incorporate facial brightness in Face Detection AF
** Metering frame is fixed to the center

Exposure: Program AE, i-Contrast, Manual; AE Lock

Exposure compensation: +/-2 stops in 1/3-stop increments

See Canon’s official SD880IS web site for more