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The Asus Transformer Prime has a 8 MP rear camera with a F2.4 aperture which is also capable of 1080p video recording at 30 FPS. The front facing camera is a 1.2 MP sensor that is also capable of 480p video. We presume Asus has not included 720p front camera support for the sake of quality and frame rate.
The camera application is simple and very straight-forward. The applications remains much the same as the one found in Android 3.0 Honeycomb and you have the option to take pictures, videos or panoramic images. You can also take time lapse videos and there is a sample of that coming up.
The left of the display is where you will find the viewfinder, while on the right is where all the options can be found. There are the usual scene, white balance, exposure and flash mode settings. The bottom of this section allows you to change capture modes and up top is a preview of the last media captured that links to gallery.
Standard 8 MP images were 3264 by 2448 pixels and anywhere from 1.5 MB to 3 MB depending on the image. Panoramic images were 2254 by 454 and 1.2 MB in size, but it does vary.
1080p videos were recording at 30 FPS, a frame rate that you cannot change, and encoded in MP4 at roughly 16 Mb/s. The 480p clips from the front facing camera were also recorded at 30 frames per second and again encoded in MP4 at roughly 3.7 Mb/s.
Picture quality is very impressive. Colour reproduction is good, while noise is very minimal even at 100% crops, although some detail is lost. That said, shutter lag was quite noticeable, especially compared to the HTC One X that does have a instant shutter feature like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
The panoramic images taken on the Prime as easily the best I have ever taken on a device, mainly by just having a lack of clipping and stitching glitches. It would be nice to see some larger images, but the quality for the pixel size can’t be complained about.
[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-dr8TmmyFg']The 1080p videos taken by the Prime’s rear camera were pretty good. The high frame rate keeps the plants swaying in the breeze smooth at the start. Looking deeper there were a few issues, colours at the top of the image on the roofs and palm trees are washed out due to the sunlight looking directly into the camera, so I guess that can easily be forgiven.
However, if you have the focus mode set to continuous auto focus you will experience the prolonging clicking of the sensor refocusing and this causes the image to jump at times. It doesn’t help that Asus has placed one of the microphones within a few centimetres of the camera sensor so in relatively quiet environments the clicking is very noticeable. Luckily for Asus, I found that changing the focus mode to infinity does solve the problem with no noticeable effect on video quality.
[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS-2cXIkyWo']For some reason time lapse videos are of great interest for me, this one was taken using a 1 second time interval.
Considering the Prime’s camera will mostly be used for pictures and videos that will end up on Facebook, Youtube or printed on a 6×4” print, Asus has included a very strong image sensor.
