Review: Sony Ericsson W760
As noted, there is no direct camera access key. Since you have to drill through the menu to get to it, the W760 isn't appropriate if you like whipping out a camera to catch a quick candid.
Since the lens is behind the screen on the slide, you have to open the camera to use it. The viewfinder on the 1.75 inch-tall LCD is 1 inch tall. This means you're getting a widescreen view, such as it is, while counter-intuitively holding the phone vertically, and the portrait view holding the screen horizontally. There is no flash.
What's constricting the view are two rows of options – zoom and white balance controls at the top of the screen, a still-to-video toggle and a resolution indicator just below. All of these could have been smaller text indicators to create more room for the viewfinder.
Like many cameras, the digital zoom only operates when shooting VGA, not 1, 2 or 3 MP resolution. When taking VGA snaps, the zoom zooms in .1 increments up to 3.2x.
Even though the camera rounds off the resolution (1, 2, 3 MP), the specs say the camera shoots 3.2 MP at its top resolution. In either event, full-sized pictures are 2048 x 1536 pixels.
You also get a variety of shoot modes: normal, panorama, frames (16 overlays, such as one with a dinosaur's mouth open and a space to frame someone's head) and burst. Panorama lets you shoot three side-by-side shots of a piece of scenery (see example) and stitches them together. Make sure your first shot is at the right angle or you'll end up with some skewed scenery.
Its shutter release is near-instantaneous and processing was impressively quick, a total of three seconds or so from snap to stored picture, nearly as fast as a standalone digital camera.
The W760 also contains still and video editing functions, Photo Fix, sort of a quick contrast/color adjustment, and PhotoDJ and VideoDJ. PhotoFix worked better to correct lighting on indoor pictures, although I'm not sure the fix is better than the original (see playing cards pictures; the brighter one is the "fixed" version). Depending on the size and complexity of the picture, the PhotoFix could take up to 10 seconds.
PhotoDJ lets you correct for light balance, brightness/contrast, color balance, to rotate the photo or to add an effect such as tint or sepia or solarize, or to add a piece of clipart, a frame or even text. What I was surprised to find PhotoDJ couldn't do was crop.
Videos were not where the manual said they would be to use VideoDJ, which theoretically lets you trim the fat by editing the start and end points.
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Sony Ericsson W760
