Choosing a smartphone - what could be more difficult?
Once, the extraction of inaccessible technical gadgets to anyone else looked very romantic and “spy”. About such things were shot militants and thrillers. Novels and even love stories were written. There were exotic countries, fatal beauties, dark personalities - who in gloomy back streets handed you briefcases with the coveted device, half an hour ago developed by an ultra-modern corporation. And after that, in secret laboratories, mad and bald scientists, in white coats, amid mysteriously sparkling lights, carefully studied the stolen novelties. Maybe even ominously laughing at this.
Now everything has become much simpler and more common - if you want to get into your use any new gadget that is not yet on the market, you just need to buy a ticket to China and walk there through the narrow streets of Shenzhen.
No, they will not ride around the world for you using connections with the Chinese mafia. And passwords about the "Slavic cabinet" also will not.
')
All you need is to visit one of the specialized exhibitions, or contact the Chinese developer by e-mail. And they are happy to, for a reasonable fee, develop from scratch, almost anything, well, or assembled from ready-made components - as a child collects a house of cubes. Especially easy in this regard, the situation is with smartphones. Now it is not even necessary to be a developer of smartphones in order to sell them under your own name. Thanks to this approach, we see smartphones manufactured by manufacturers of Swiss watches, Singapore air conditioners or even American excavators. In fact, if you have money, you can also issue a brand of smartphones named after you beloved!
So whether we like it or not, it is now one of the modern business tools that helps reduce your expenses. And by and large there is nothing bad in it, the main thing is to be able to use this tool.
You can put a smartphone on the market in the form in which you bought it from Chinese developers, hoping that the Chinese did everything well. But this means that you do not quite correctly know how to use this tool.
A much more practical approach would be to spend a little more money and time to independently verify whether China really did make things better, and whether it was necessary to finish something. So as not to lose money and reputation? We in our company prefer to check everything and as carefully as possible.
By itself, the process of testing samples that are supposed to be released for sale does not differ in any way from the process of choosing a smartphone by you, which is already on display. Previously, we study the technological features of the platform, components, and yes - we look at the price :)
Simply, instead of the simple “like the color - do not like the buttons”, we have to use additional software and hardware that give us the very details, for the absence of which, geeks so curse the amateur reviews of ordinary consumers :)
Do you want details? I have them.
In front of me is the most typical smartphone that a Chinese company has developed for our order. It is inexpressive in form, it is of the most ordinary design and with the exception of just the titanic capacity of the battery - it has modest characteristics. He may well be the faithful workhorse of this year. Or the next. Or not to become at all if his defects outweigh his merits, and “finishing to mind” will turn out to be too expensive.
What could be more ordinary?
This smartphone has a rectangle shape and even has a screen. We can safely ignore the form - it can change within certain limits, the possibilities and quality of the telephone connection are almost the same now for all models, but let's say the screen?
That's it from the screen we will begin our test for suitability. This is the part of the smartphone that most interacts with us - we spend quite a lot of time looking at the screen, and not just admiring the design. Therefore, this is one of the parts of the smartphone that should be studied properly.
The screen options of this smartphone are as follows:
Made with IPS On-Cell technology, 1280x720 HD, 5.0 ”. Its brightness is 481.7 cd / m2, the contrast is 565: 1, and the color temperature is 10163 ° K.
SRGB chart
After examining the first diagram obtained, we see that the viewing angles are traditionally quite good for the IPS matrix. When the screen rotates the images, the colors do not change and are read normally, the color transmission is generally not bad, the errors are quite small and the area of color coverage is slightly larger than the sRGB area.
RGB Levels Chart
Everything seems fine, but after studying two more diagrams, we find that with the distribution of colors on the gray scale, unfortunately, everything is sad.
Blue exceeds the norm by 30%, red is below the norm by 35%, and only green is almost normal, it is above the “only” norm by 8%. As usual in low-cost smartphones, in ours, cold tones will prevail. But the color temperature above normal by almost 3700 ° K. The display has an average value of contrast, but high brightness.
Gamma Chart
The brightness value is probably due to the high gamma value, which increases from the normal value of 2.2 in dark tones to 3.6 in bright. This means that there will be no problems with reading the display information in the sun, but in the usual case the bright areas of the picture will look very bright. Most likely, where the semitones are still visible in the original image, quite bright areas will appear on the display of this smartphone. And in principle, this is all that can be said about the screen for our future product. For an inexpensive, budget smartphone will do.
The navigation capabilities of a modern smartphone are not a necessary function of the phone, however, it has become an integral part of any smartphone that falls into our hands - in most cases, the navigation module is already embedded directly into the MTK chipset. This smartphone is no exception, so we select the navigation capabilities as the second item of our checks. Our smartphone navigation capabilities are modest and traditional. We only have a GPS module, which sees approximately 10 GPS satellites, of which only 8 are used. The average SNR level is 26.3 dB, and the average accuracy value is 2.25 m.
The absence of the GLONASS system seems to be some inconvenience, and even a slightly annoying fact. But on the other hand, many Chinese smartphones of the mass sector on the MTK chipset, declared as two-system, in real conditions like they caught only GPS, so only this system is “caught” without problems. But GLONASS satellites, perhaps they see - displaying these satellites as accessible, but they do not receive information from them, or they receive it, but not all. This conclusion can be drawn from the situation when programs like “RAW-NMEA” on many MTK-smartphones show only GPS logs even if both GPS and GLONASS are declared. While the navigation equipment built on, say, U-blox 7, in the "glonass" mode gives all the necessary information, and in full.
So, why pay more for something that probably doesn't work?
Having finished with the theory, we get behind the wheel and begin field trials. For the analysis of the navigation receiver, two NMEA logs were recorded when driving in a car. A-GPS mode itself was disabled.
Navigation charts
I deliberately also provide the image of the tracks on satellite images, because on conventional Google map maps it seems that the tracks have a large deviation from the route, but in reality no noticeable deviations of the tracks were found, and the receiver as a whole showed quite good correspondence of the recorded tracks to the actual route , despite the fact that it only works with the GPS navigation system.
Thus, we can say that in terms of the navigation parameters of the smartphone look normal. I think that there should be no problems with navigation.
But it is precisely the cameras of our candidate frankly "more than modest." The main camera at 5MP, giving pictures of 2560x1920 pixels, PDAF, F = 3.5mm, f / 2.8. Front camera 2 MP, taking pictures with a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels, FF, F = 3.5mm, f / 2.8.
These parameters are no more than half the capabilities of the Mediatek MT6580 chipset. We can say that this is definitely not a photo-phone, but on the other hand, for the intended budget smartphone from the category “for every day” this will be quite enough. It remains only to conduct a "field test".
The test will consist in shooting an ISO 12233 test table with subsequent analysis of the images by the Quick MTF program. Shooting will be conducted in bright and low light, as well as in low light, but with a flash.
The level of bright lighting set: 560 - 580 lux
The level of low lighting will be: 16 - 20 lux
And here, paraphrasing one Russian poet, we will get many wonderful discoveries, and they are not at all happy. In fact, we can say that the camera is extremely unsuccessful. Even for a budget device.
The resolution of the camera is not impressive - there is a wide variation in the resolution of the camera over the image area, which most likely indicates serious problems with optics. The camera shows very mediocre results, especially in low light conditions. It is very likely that the camera, besides all the problems, is still very poorly calibrated. It can also be noted that sharping is almost never used.
The width of the edge blurring is closely related to the resolution of the camera. The lower the resolution, the greater the width of the edge fuzziness, so everything in the table below is natural.
A bad camera adjustment I think can be confirmed by the following simple test.
Let's look at the resolution of different areas of the same ISO 12233 test table, obtained in bright light. Even with the naked eye one can see how blurry the image is in the upper image and more or less clearly it is in the lower image. I repeat - these are different parts of the same picture, the original that we attach, and the resolution in different parts of the same picture is more than doubled!
Upper left corner:
Bottom right corner:
Thus, after studying all these details, our expert concludes: “The display fits into the concept of an inexpensive device. With navigation - more or less normal. But the camera disappointed. ”
We can only decide whether we will replace the camera module with something more qualitative and, accordingly, more expensive, or leave everything as it is because the consumer niche for which this smartphone is supposed to be launched is those users who are more important than the quality of the photographs comparable to quality of SLR cameras, and battery life is important. And this parameter in the future smartphone will be very good!
Now everything has become much simpler and more common - if you want to get into your use any new gadget that is not yet on the market, you just need to buy a ticket to China and walk there through the narrow streets of Shenzhen.
No, they will not ride around the world for you using connections with the Chinese mafia. And passwords about the "Slavic cabinet" also will not.
')
All you need is to visit one of the specialized exhibitions, or contact the Chinese developer by e-mail. And they are happy to, for a reasonable fee, develop from scratch, almost anything, well, or assembled from ready-made components - as a child collects a house of cubes. Especially easy in this regard, the situation is with smartphones. Now it is not even necessary to be a developer of smartphones in order to sell them under your own name. Thanks to this approach, we see smartphones manufactured by manufacturers of Swiss watches, Singapore air conditioners or even American excavators. In fact, if you have money, you can also issue a brand of smartphones named after you beloved!
So whether we like it or not, it is now one of the modern business tools that helps reduce your expenses. And by and large there is nothing bad in it, the main thing is to be able to use this tool.
You can put a smartphone on the market in the form in which you bought it from Chinese developers, hoping that the Chinese did everything well. But this means that you do not quite correctly know how to use this tool.
A much more practical approach would be to spend a little more money and time to independently verify whether China really did make things better, and whether it was necessary to finish something. So as not to lose money and reputation? We in our company prefer to check everything and as carefully as possible.
► Testing
By itself, the process of testing samples that are supposed to be released for sale does not differ in any way from the process of choosing a smartphone by you, which is already on display. Previously, we study the technological features of the platform, components, and yes - we look at the price :)
Simply, instead of the simple “like the color - do not like the buttons”, we have to use additional software and hardware that give us the very details, for the absence of which, geeks so curse the amateur reviews of ordinary consumers :)
Do you want details? I have them.
In front of me is the most typical smartphone that a Chinese company has developed for our order. It is inexpressive in form, it is of the most ordinary design and with the exception of just the titanic capacity of the battery - it has modest characteristics. He may well be the faithful workhorse of this year. Or the next. Or not to become at all if his defects outweigh his merits, and “finishing to mind” will turn out to be too expensive.
● OS type: Android 5.1
● Processor: MT6580
● Memory: 1GB + 8GB
● Display: 1280x720, 5.0 ”
● Main camera: 2560x1920, 5 MP.
● Front camera: 1600x1200, 2 MP.
● Navigation: GPS only
● Battery: 8000 mAh
What could be more ordinary?
This smartphone has a rectangle shape and even has a screen. We can safely ignore the form - it can change within certain limits, the possibilities and quality of the telephone connection are almost the same now for all models, but let's say the screen?
That's it from the screen we will begin our test for suitability. This is the part of the smartphone that most interacts with us - we spend quite a lot of time looking at the screen, and not just admiring the design. Therefore, this is one of the parts of the smartphone that should be studied properly.
► Screen
The screen options of this smartphone are as follows:
Made with IPS On-Cell technology, 1280x720 HD, 5.0 ”. Its brightness is 481.7 cd / m2, the contrast is 565: 1, and the color temperature is 10163 ° K.
SRGB chart
After examining the first diagram obtained, we see that the viewing angles are traditionally quite good for the IPS matrix. When the screen rotates the images, the colors do not change and are read normally, the color transmission is generally not bad, the errors are quite small and the area of color coverage is slightly larger than the sRGB area.
RGB Levels Chart
Everything seems fine, but after studying two more diagrams, we find that with the distribution of colors on the gray scale, unfortunately, everything is sad.
Blue exceeds the norm by 30%, red is below the norm by 35%, and only green is almost normal, it is above the “only” norm by 8%. As usual in low-cost smartphones, in ours, cold tones will prevail. But the color temperature above normal by almost 3700 ° K. The display has an average value of contrast, but high brightness.
Gamma Chart
The brightness value is probably due to the high gamma value, which increases from the normal value of 2.2 in dark tones to 3.6 in bright. This means that there will be no problems with reading the display information in the sun, but in the usual case the bright areas of the picture will look very bright. Most likely, where the semitones are still visible in the original image, quite bright areas will appear on the display of this smartphone. And in principle, this is all that can be said about the screen for our future product. For an inexpensive, budget smartphone will do.
► Navigation
The navigation capabilities of a modern smartphone are not a necessary function of the phone, however, it has become an integral part of any smartphone that falls into our hands - in most cases, the navigation module is already embedded directly into the MTK chipset. This smartphone is no exception, so we select the navigation capabilities as the second item of our checks. Our smartphone navigation capabilities are modest and traditional. We only have a GPS module, which sees approximately 10 GPS satellites, of which only 8 are used. The average SNR level is 26.3 dB, and the average accuracy value is 2.25 m.
The absence of the GLONASS system seems to be some inconvenience, and even a slightly annoying fact. But on the other hand, many Chinese smartphones of the mass sector on the MTK chipset, declared as two-system, in real conditions like they caught only GPS, so only this system is “caught” without problems. But GLONASS satellites, perhaps they see - displaying these satellites as accessible, but they do not receive information from them, or they receive it, but not all. This conclusion can be drawn from the situation when programs like “RAW-NMEA” on many MTK-smartphones show only GPS logs even if both GPS and GLONASS are declared. While the navigation equipment built on, say, U-blox 7, in the "glonass" mode gives all the necessary information, and in full.
So, why pay more for something that probably doesn't work?
Having finished with the theory, we get behind the wheel and begin field trials. For the analysis of the navigation receiver, two NMEA logs were recorded when driving in a car. A-GPS mode itself was disabled.
Navigation charts
I deliberately also provide the image of the tracks on satellite images, because on conventional Google map maps it seems that the tracks have a large deviation from the route, but in reality no noticeable deviations of the tracks were found, and the receiver as a whole showed quite good correspondence of the recorded tracks to the actual route , despite the fact that it only works with the GPS navigation system.
Thus, we can say that in terms of the navigation parameters of the smartphone look normal. I think that there should be no problems with navigation.
► Camera
But it is precisely the cameras of our candidate frankly "more than modest." The main camera at 5MP, giving pictures of 2560x1920 pixels, PDAF, F = 3.5mm, f / 2.8. Front camera 2 MP, taking pictures with a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels, FF, F = 3.5mm, f / 2.8.
These parameters are no more than half the capabilities of the Mediatek MT6580 chipset. We can say that this is definitely not a photo-phone, but on the other hand, for the intended budget smartphone from the category “for every day” this will be quite enough. It remains only to conduct a "field test".
The test will consist in shooting an ISO 12233 test table with subsequent analysis of the images by the Quick MTF program. Shooting will be conducted in bright and low light, as well as in low light, but with a flash.
The level of bright lighting set: 560 - 580 lux
The level of low lighting will be: 16 - 20 lux
And here, paraphrasing one Russian poet, we will get many wonderful discoveries, and they are not at all happy. In fact, we can say that the camera is extremely unsuccessful. Even for a budget device.
Charts
The resolution of the camera is not impressive - there is a wide variation in the resolution of the camera over the image area, which most likely indicates serious problems with optics. The camera shows very mediocre results, especially in low light conditions. It is very likely that the camera, besides all the problems, is still very poorly calibrated. It can also be noted that sharping is almost never used.
The best value, bright light 988.8 LPH or 51.5% from 1920
Average value, bright light 825.6 LPH or 43.0% from 1920
The worst value, bright light 393.6 LPH or 20.5% of 1920
The best value, low light 518.4 LPH or 27.0% from 1920
Average, low light 412.8 LPH or 21.5% of 1920
The worst value, low light 297.6 LPH or 15.5% from 1920
The best value, low light flash 758.4 LPH or 39.5% from 1920
Average value, low light flash 633.6 LPH or 33% from 1920
Lowest flash, low light flash 345.6 LPH or 18% of 1920
The width of the edge blurring is closely related to the resolution of the camera. The lower the resolution, the greater the width of the edge fuzziness, so everything in the table below is natural.
Edge fuzziness width when contrast increases from 10% to 90%
Best value, bright light: edge blur width 1.86 pix. CA = 0.43 pix
The average value, bright light: the edge fuzziness width is 2.48 pix. CA = 0.35 pix
Worst value, bright light: 5.43 pixel edge blur. CA = 0.82 pix
Best value, low light: edge blurring 4.94 pixel width. CA = 0.58 pix
Medium value, low light: edge fuzzy width 5.29 pix. CA = 0.46 pix
Worst value, low light: edge blur width 6.92 pix. CA = 0.37 pix
The best value, low light flash: the edge blur width 2.79 pix. CA = 0.37 pix
Medium value, low light flash: width of blurred edges 3.32 pix. CA = 0.28 pix
Worst value, low light flash: edge fuzzy width 5.42 pix. CA = 0.51 pix
A bad camera adjustment I think can be confirmed by the following simple test.
Let's look at the resolution of different areas of the same ISO 12233 test table, obtained in bright light. Even with the naked eye one can see how blurry the image is in the upper image and more or less clearly it is in the lower image. I repeat - these are different parts of the same picture, the original that we attach, and the resolution in different parts of the same picture is more than doubled!
Upper left corner:
Bottom right corner:
Thus, after studying all these details, our expert concludes: “The display fits into the concept of an inexpensive device. With navigation - more or less normal. But the camera disappointed. ”
We can only decide whether we will replace the camera module with something more qualitative and, accordingly, more expensive, or leave everything as it is because the consumer niche for which this smartphone is supposed to be launched is those users who are more important than the quality of the photographs comparable to quality of SLR cameras, and battery life is important. And this parameter in the future smartphone will be very good!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/394785/
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