Samsung SGH-G810 Review

Camera:

The Samsung should perform well as a cameraphone, with its 5-megapixel autofocus camera with Xenon flash and optical zoom.

When you open the camera’s protective lid, you’ll have to wait around five second before being able to take a photo. No matter what the conditions are, the phone needs no more than a second to focus (impressive) and additional four seconds to save the image. The interface is the same as the one in G800 and all of the most frequently used settings found in a bar at the top of the screen, the rest are in a separate menu (Settings). Unfortunately, this is the last one of our good impressions.



Quality of the photos taken in natural lighting conditions was average in comparison to the other 5-megapixel phones. The colors are realistic, but when viewed in their original size, it becomes clear that the noise has “killed” the details. This is a significant improvement in comparison to the G800, but even the budget LG KC550 performs better.


When shooting indoors the colors are still realistic, but the amount of noise increases and the detail level is significantly reduced. The Xenon flash, which should be one of the phone’s main advantages, cannot illuminate the objects very well.


In the end, we are not pleased with G810’s camera performance as a camera: the interface is OK, it’s fast, but the pictures are mediocre and the flash doesn’t do a proper job.

Despite the VGA resolution, the recorded videos disappointed us. When watching them on a computer we experienced slight skipping with the audio being unclear and sounding like a background noise.

Samsung SGH-G810 Sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution
* Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.


Multimedia:

The music player typical for the S60 OS is also present. It can filter your music by several criteria and sports an easy to use interface. Unfortunately, it lacks equalizer and sound effects. You also have an FM radio (the headphones are used for antenna), which can store up to fifty stations. The weird thing is that it doesn’t support RDS.

The built-in speaker isn’t loud enough and won’t impress you with quality if you are planning to use it for listening to music. The Nokia N95 offers much better sound quality through its stereo speakers, than the one provided by G810. Our test unit arrived without bundled handsfree, so we were unable to test it. Luckily the device sports a standard 3.5mm jack, which allows you to easily plug in any headphones. This way the sound quality can be pretty high, depending on the headphones.

For watching videos you have the standard for Symbian S60, RealPlayer. We were unable to play MP4 files encoded in H.263, which is no big deal, because we didn’t have any problems with H.264 encoded ones. Even videos in VGA resolution played smoothly and in good quality.