Review: Pantech Jest
Photos
Photo quality was a strange issue on the Pantech Jest, and I don't mean that in any good way. All of my images looked bad, and all for different reasons. One picture might be blurry and washed out, with a grey haze covering the image. Another might have a red cast over everything, making me look sunburnt in a self portrait. Sometimes the problem was over sharpening, which gave my pictures a look like a still image from a VHS tape. Other times, images were blown out by backlighting, and white spots took on an ominous blue aura. The only consistency was that photos looked consistently poor. I didn't expect much from the 2 megapixel camera, and the Jest still managed to under-deliver.
Video
Video quality on the Pantech Jest is horrendous. Videos had a layer of pixelation and blur that came down in columns and made me feel like I was looking through The Matrix. Videos can only be recorded at a small QCIF resolution (176 by 144 pixels), and clips are limited to 15 seconds. The Jest was unable to capture audio while I recorded my video samples. The camcorder is only meant for MMS messaging, but even for this basic task, I would avoid the camcorder altogether.
3GPP2 / MPEG-4 format (viewable with QuickTime)