Camera - why, oh why!
The 2 mega pixel fixed focus CMOS camera on the Z770 won’t make people “wow”. That’s a fact, and there’s no reason to avoid facing it immediately. Other than that it lacks some sort of flash to light up in low-light situations. Another camera limit is the camera software. It won’t let you zoom in when in 2 mega pixel resolution-setting (not that it matters, though), and because there’s no physical camera button on the side of Z770, you’re stuck with the portrait mode camera user interface, which is lagging the horizontal one in terms of usability and a few features.
Instead of having a set of horizontally placed icons you can press to active pop-up menus, you’re forced to use the slow and plain-looking left soft key menu style. This soft key is called “options”.
The options menu will give you the ability to set the following;
- View all pictures
- Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
- Picture size - 2 MP (1600 x 1200 pixels), 1 MP (1280 x 960 pixels) & VGA (640 x 480 pixels)
- Night mode - Off & On
- Self-timer - Off & On
- White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent & Incandescent
- Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative & Sepia
- Picture Quality - Fine & Normal
- Review - On & Off
- Save to - Mem. card & Phone mem.
- Shutter sound - Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4 & Off
- Reset counter
Are you curious to see how it performs? Check out the samples below.
As you can see, the Z770 delivers top-notch colour saturation in most cases, which is really nice. The photos aren’t always sharp because it lacks auto focus. When you’re in a range of one metre of the target, most photos will come out quite OK, though. During the test period I experienced slight white balance problems, but absolutely nothing to worry about.
Z770 does video recordings as well. They’re encoded in MP4 format in a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The frame rate is 30 frames per seconds, which is really nice. The video bit rate is about 370 Kbps, which is OK. The video quality is expectable - nothing ground-breaking, but it isn’t bad either. You can check out a video sample below, or download it here.
When you’re done shooting, you might want to check out your most recent shots. I find the photo viewer very good, and it’s loaded with brilliant features, like X-Pict Story - a cool slide show application with mood settings, effects, transitions and sounds. Another nice feature is photo tagging - by tagging your photos, you’ll always know where they are, and it’ll be faster getting to them. The Z770 also automatically sorts your photos by month, if you prefer that way of sorting.