Dell Streak Review

The Dell Streak ships with a dual camera configuration. A front facing 640×480 model and a rear facing 5 megapixel unit which delivers 2592×1944 pixel resolution. Both of which can also record video – at 640×480.

Sadly I found the quality of both poor, with photographs only looking at best average under near perfect outdoor lighting conditions.

The camera application offers the standarised set of Android camera options such as white balance, JPEG compression and syncing to 50/60hz signals for recording video.

The image above is about as good as the camera quality gets – it isn't too bad, but there is heavy shadow noise and colour balance issues. We also noticed that unless the light level was high that the camera had a tendency to blur images also.

Auto flash is not present and you can either turn it on, or off manually. As you use the camera in a landscape mode, we also found it really easy to accidentally cover the camera lens with a finger. The camera application is also extremely slow in operation, with 3 second waits between shooting, then preview and then the next shot.

Video quality is also quite poor and the Streak struggles to deliver indoor video footage with clean white balance. The video above is a clear indication of the camera auto adjusting the white balance mid way through (around 7 seconds in) and getting it wrong. In live view mode we also found the response would judder in poorly lit conditions, much like overloading a video card and seeing the frame rate drop in half.

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