Windows Phone Thoughts: Loox Like a Winner - A Review of the Loox 720 Pocket PC

The Camera
It seems that many manufacturers of portable electronic devices are convinced that people need a camera everywhere they go. So we have the onslaught of cell phone designs that include a digital camera. And now it’s beginning to move into the PDA arena.

It’s just too bad that these cameras yield results that range from mediocre to bad. And the camera in the Loox is no exception.


Figure 17: An indoor shot with the Loox 720 - Click the image above for a larger version of the photo.


Figure 18: The same indoor shot with a Canon G6 digital camera - Click the image above for a larger version of the photo.

I took 2 similar indoor photos, one with the Loox 720, shown in Figure 17, and one with my regular digital camera, shown in Figure 18. The photos are just as they came from the cameras, other than a color balance correction to compensate for the ambient tungsten lighting. As you can see, compared to the photo from the Canon, the Loox photo is softly focused with low contrast and poorly saturated colors.


Figure 19: An outdoor shot with the Loox 720 - Click the image above for a larger version of the photo.


Figure 20: The same outdoor shot with a Canon G6 digital camera - Click the image above for a larger version of the photo.

Cameras such as the one in the Loox tend to do their best with natural light, so I took another pair of pictures with both cameras, this time using an outdoor scene. The Loox did somewhat better here, with better color saturation. But the photo is still very softly focused when compared to the Canon. To be fair, the Loox has a fixed focus lens, while the Canon has a high quality auto-focus lens, but the soft focus of the Loox was still disappointing.

The Loox camera software features 4 different image sizes and a number of photo effects that it calls “ambiance”. The latter is a bit counterintuitive for more experienced photographers, as it includes settings for incandescent and fluorescent, similar to settings for white balance on other cameras. However, with typical cameras, selecting fluorescent compensates for the blue cast inherent to fluorescent lights; with the Loox, it adds an effect to make the picture look like it was taken under fluorescent lights.

One minor advantage over the similar camera in my cell phone is that the Loox provides an LED that functions as a flash. It does help a bit in low light conditions.

There are a few more things that could be said about the camera, but I’ll leave it at this. And I’ll recommend that you not consider the camera as any kind of real advantage for the Loox over the competition, unless your standards for photographic quality are very low. This is one feature that could have been left off, in my opinion, and it’s the only real issue that I have with this otherwise very impressive device.