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EVO 3D optics really that subpar?

linzgeneral

Well-Known Member
May 29, 2010
108
20
Sorry guys but I feel extremely compelled to rant as I am very upset with HTC and the cameras they put into the EVO 3D. I went to the mall today to spend some more time with the Sensation to put to bed my fear that its screen might be a little clearer and more colorful than the 3D. As soon as I turned the sensation on, I was horrified to find that it was a lot brighter than my 3d. After realizing that the Sensation was set to almost max brightness I proceeded to adjust the 3D to a similar level. Alas, they both appeared identical. Even with a different wallpaper it was obvious that there was really no discernable difference between the screens in terms of brightness and clarity. I went on to test the colors by observing identical apps on both screens and thought the Sensation's colors did have a little more pop, but it is practically impossible to differentiate between the two without having them next to each other and making a very concentrated effort to find a difference. That being said, I was very satisfied and concluded that both screens are in fact equivalent.

I proceeded to check the cameras in relation to stills and videos. Boy what a difference, like night and day. The Sensation's stills were colorful and sharp - very impressive. The 3D's camera seemed very dull, lacking color, and were not sharp -almost seem to be out of focus. Although I knew that the 3D camera was garbage, I thought that the video capture was OK. Boy was I wrong. The T-mobile rep, a friend of mine since I have spent so many hours with his model, pulled out his Galaxy S and took a short video of the activity in the mall. The video was very impressive, sharp, vibrant, looked like a professional camera. The Sensation also matched the GS with sharp, colorful, fluid video. My turn.. The 3d's video looked washed out and lacked any color and clarity. Wow...my heart almost hit the floor.

After all that I was shocked even more a few minutes later when I used the mirror app on both phones to check the front camera. Isn't the front cam on the 3D supposed to be 1.3 mp while the Sensation's version is only VGA? Something is wrong or someone is not telling the truth. My picture on the Sensation appeared sharp and colorful -representing my true color while the same pic appeared grainy and washed out on the 3D. What the hell? I ran a number of tests, same result. I did notice that the image on my 3D was much bigger than the one on the Sensation which tells me they are not the same camera. The Sensation was just much clearer.

In the end, I think I am experiencing buyer's remorse, something that never ever, ever crossed my mind before. The simple truth is that the 3d's optics got exposed today and lets me know that a major part of the phones upgrade was severely compromised to include the 3D feature. I love the 3D but not to this extent of sacrifice. I already sold my beloved 4G but am seriously thinking about keeping the phone for another 2 weeks to see if software could improve these shortcomings. If not I am afraid I will have to give up the QHD display I covet so much and wait for the Samsung Within. Not at all interested in the Photon and its pentile fake QHD display. Although I like the colors of the Samsung display, I am turned off by the fact that they are still using last generation resolution. At this point I am reserved to pursue the lesser of the evils.

All I want to know is did HTC really F-up this bad with the 3D optics or can this be fixed with software? I don't want to hear about settings because I never had to change anything on my 4G whose camera runs circles around the 3D in good light and the Sensation had stock setting as well and performed impressively. My wife's 5mp EVO shift's cam take much, much better pics than my next generation 3D. I have taken well over 60 pics and don't have one single one that I can keep. This is unacceptable, amazing 3D ability or not...
 
Sorry guys but I feel extremely compelled to rant as I am very upset with HTC and the cameras they put into the EVO 3D. I went to the mall today to spend some more time with the Sensation to put to bed my fear that its screen might be a little clearer and more colorful than the 3D. As soon as I turned the sensation on, I was horrified to find that it was a lot brighter than my 3d. After realizing that the Sensation was set to almost max brightness I proceeded to adjust the 3D to a similar level. Alas, they both appeared identical. Even with a different wallpaper it was obvious that there was really no discernable difference between the screens in terms of brightness and clarity. I went on to test the colors by observing identical apps on both screens and thought the Sensation's colors did have a little more pop, but it is practically impossible to differentiate between the two without having them next to each other and making a very concentrated effort to find a difference. That being said, I was very satisfied and concluded that both screens are in fact equivalent.

I proceeded to check the cameras in relation to stills and videos. Boy what a difference, like night and day. The Sensation's stills were colorful and sharp - very impressive. The 3D's camera seemed very dull, lacking color, and were not sharp -almost seem to be out of focus. Although I knew that the 3D camera was garbage, I thought that the video capture was OK. Boy was I wrong. The T-mobile rep, a friend of mine since I have spent so many hours with his model, pulled out his Galaxy S and took a short video of the activity in the mall. The video was very impressive, sharp, vibrant, looked like a professional camera. The Sensation also matched the GS with sharp, colorful, fluid video. My turn.. The 3d's video looked washed out and lacked any color and clarity. Wow...my heart almost hit the floor.

After all that I was shocked even more a few minutes later when I used the mirror app on both phones to check the front camera. Isn't the front cam on the 3D supposed to be 1.3 mp while the Sensation's version is only VGA? Something is wrong or someone is not telling the truth. My picture on the Sensation appeared sharp and colorful -representing my true color while the same pic appeared grainy and washed out on the 3D. What the hell? I ran a number of tests, same result. I did notice that the image on my 3D was much bigger than the one on the Sensation which tells me they are not the same camera. The Sensation was just much clearer.

In the end, I think I am experiencing buyer's remorse, something that never ever, ever crossed my mind before. The simple truth is that the 3d's optics got exposed today and lets me know that a major part of the phones upgrade was severely compromised to include the 3D feature. I love the 3D but not to this extent of sacrifice. I already sold my beloved 4G but am seriously thinking about keeping the phone for another 2 weeks to see if software could improve these shortcomings. If not I am afraid I will have to give up the QHD display I covet so much and wait for the Samsung Within. Not at all interested in the Photon and its pentile fake QHD display. Although I like the colors of the Samsung display, I am turned off by the fact that they are still using last generation resolution. At this point I am reserved to pursue the lesser of the evils.

All I want to know is did HTC really F-up this bad with the 3D optics or can this be fixed with software? I don't want to hear about settings because I never had to change anything on my 4G whose camera runs circles around the 3D in good light and the Sensation had stock setting as well and performed impressively. My wife's 5mp EVO shift's cam take much, much better pics than my next generation 3D. I have taken well over 60 pics and don't have one single one that I can keep. This is unacceptable, amazing 3D ability or not...
My FFC works fine for me. Way better than the Evo 4G. Especially in low light. I used Skype on it last night a my little brother said my picture quality was better than their $100 dollar webcam and I had no lights on just the tv and what was coming through the closed blinds.

I think the camera is fine. It's a phone. If picture quality is such and issue buy a DSLR, point and shoot and camcorder. Try carrying all those around. Lol. It's a phone a phone first. The camera is just an extra.
 
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My FFC works fine for me. Way better than the Evo 4G. Especially in low light. I used Skype on it last night a my little brother said my picture quality was better than their $100 dollar webcam and I had no lights on just the tv and what was coming through the closed blinds.

I think the camera is fine. It's a phone. If picture quality is such and issue buy a DSLR, point and shoot and camcorder. Try carrying all those around. Lol. It's a phone a phone first. The camera is just an extra.

All the other high end devices have much better camera and they are only phones too, know what I mean? The standard is increasing and HTC is going backwards -at lest in this particular model. HTC took this camera back at least two years. Someone made a joke, or maybe it wasn't, that he heard that HTC was using left over cams from the Hero (harendous BTW). I thought that comment was hilarious but have since stopped laughing. I am seriously wondering if I just have a bad camera. This is similar to how so many complain how bad the 4G camera was but mine was actually superb...hmmmm...
 
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Evo 3D

Natural Sun Light
IMAG0017-1.jpg


Evo 4G

Artificial Light
IMAG0219.jpg


Natural Sun Light
IMAG0088.jpg


No complaints from me. 3D doesnt look any worse than the 4G. If anything the 3D looks clearer.
 
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Lighting and a steady hand are both important to getting good results from this camera. One thing I found that blurred some of my pics was pushing the shutter button and releasing it as the picture was being taken. I figured out that by holding the shutter button down until after the pic was taken resolved most of the blur I was getting.

I'm getting better results than my 4G in my pictures.
 
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Even though I don't have any issues with the quality of the E3D camera (understanding that it's a cell phone camera, and that it has comparable quality to my E4G, which was also decent for a cell phone camera), I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are experiencing horrible picture quality from their E3D. Given that I can't reproduce the results, I'm pretty confident that the problem is not universal. I would therefore get an exchange at the store you purchased it from.

It would seem obvious to me that if my camera is defective, I can compare it to any other phone and come out disappointed. And I'm betting if you compare your E3D with another one, you might see an equal disparity as you did with the Sensation.

It's unfortunate that the camera quality is not consistent. Wondering now if this is just a quality control issue for the camera manufacturer.
 
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I know squat about photography, but I have no complaints with pictures like this.

Thanks for the pic. I am becoming convinced that I have defective camera or at least a very bad one. I cannot dream to take a pic that good and have noticed that my FFC is really bad as well - very washed out and grainy with colored lines of pixelation running through the image.
 
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Even though I don't have any issues with the quality of the E3D camera (understanding that it's a cell phone camera, and that it has comparable quality to my E4G, which was also decent for a cell phone camera), I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are experiencing horrible picture quality from their E3D. Given that I can't reproduce the results, I'm pretty confident that the problem is not universal. I would therefore get an exchange at the store you purchased it from.

It would seem obvious to me that if my camera is defective, I can compare it to any other phone and come out disappointed. And I'm betting if you compare your E3D with another one, you might see an equal disparity as you did with the Sensation.

It's unfortunate that the camera quality is not consistent. Wondering now if this is just a quality control issue for the camera manufacturer.

That's exactly what I am doing, sitting in the Best Buy parking lot as I type this. It is really bothering me so I will compare with BBC and the Sprint store today. I made the mistake once with my Touch Pro 2 which had an attroucous camera. I had seen at least two other people who had much better images, like nikght and day compared to mine, and it never crossed my mind that my camera could be bad. I just resolved to not using it at all which was a shame because I love taking pics with my phone.
 
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There is quite a bit of comparison between outdoors and indoors (low light picture). Generally speaking pictures taken in bright light will be much sharper and better saturated. This happens for two reasons:
First the aperture will be smaller (most lenses have better resolution with small apertures) and generally speaking sensors behave better when there is more light (better saturation/less noise).


I know squat about photography, but I have no complaints with pictures like this.
 
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I have the same exact problem. Bright lighting = good pictures. But it seems in anything with less light, the camera has a hard time to adjust to the lighting resulting in grainy pictures which look like really low quality pictures. And what's the point of the dual LED flash... it sucks. Pictures look completely artificial with the LED flash and you can say goodbye to close up pictures as well as far away pictures using the LED flash.

I also noticed that my "3d" pictures are not as bright as the same picture taken in 2d (using the LED flash). I wonder why?

I am seriously thinking about exchanging out my phone, but I don't want to go through the exchange process since I bought mine off of Amazon. What do you guys think??

And I don't buy the "phone first" argument. I bought the phone because it was suppose to have awesome features including an awesome marketed camera. If I was going with the "phone first" argument, I would of just took the free flip phone with 2mp front camera. These phones are made so that we don't have to carry individual ipod, phone, camera, etc. in our pockets. Instead we can have ALL those features on one device. And that's what HTC markets and that's what I, the consumer, has bought.
 
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I've been taking lots of pictures in both 2 and 3D and imho they turn out great. I haven't encountered the greenish tint at all. Pictures and video are clear with bright sharp color. I have shared lots of my pics and videos with others and have received nothing but positive reviews. I am no professional by any means and could very well have issues I don't even know about but as an average user I am very pleased.
 
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I think more common sequence will be user picks up phone and takes pictures and find that they like the EVO 4G pictures better. I find that the 3D takes much better motion shots than the 4G but the 4G takes better pictures in ideal lighting like many others have found. But thinking back to where the 4G camera started, the is certainly hope thatthe pictures on the 3D can improve as well and maybe even include that missing 1080p.


However, I will acknowledge that after taking pics side by side, the 3d is in fact sharper with the images. Try it for yourself and you'll see. The 3d seems to darken the images as well when they are on the screen, perhaps to save battery. It also does not allow as much brightness as the 4g either, but the pictures are really sharp if you play with the phone just a little. In darker situations, add some brightness and watch the pictures come alive.
 
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I think more common sequence will be user picks up phone and takes pictures and find that they like the EVO 4G pictures better. I find that the 3D takes much better motion shots than the 4G but the 4G takes better pictures in ideal lighting like many others have found. But thinking back to where the 4G camera started, the is certainly hope thatthe pictures on the 3D can improve as well and maybe even include that missing 1080p.


However, I will acknowledge that after taking pics side by side, the 3d is in fact sharper with the images. Try it for yourself and you'll see. The 3d seems to darken the images as well when they are on the screen, perhaps to save battery. It also does not allow as much brightness as the 4g either, but the pictures are really sharp if you play with the phone just a little. In darker situations, add some brightness and watch the pictures come alive.

Thanks for the tip. How exactly are you adding brightness?
 
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