After using the 2024 Moto Razr for two months, here are some of my thoughts on its camera system. Overall, I’m very happy with it. My most recent camera phone experience is with iPhone 12 mini and 12 Pro. The Razr’s cameras are more than good enough and are a reliable replacement.
Cameras
The camera system launches and is ready to snap a photo at least as fast as my iPhone. Better still, the twist-to-launch gesture works as reliably as I first experienced way back on the Moto X. Even my wife likes that feature – it’s no gimmick. The difference here, though, is it takes getting used to twisting without accidentally starting to flip the phone closed.
Once the camera is readied, you can switch between its different lenses and modes. It goes from Macro, .5x, 1x, to 2x. As I understand it, the 2x telephoto is a sensor-crop rather than a physical lens switch. But it’s not a 2x digital zoom. With that, there are many settings you can manually adjust if desired; there’s most, if not all, the traits you’d expect in a modern phone camera.
One of my favorite things about the Razr’s photo shooting is that it doesn’t do what my iPhones did. They almost always made images too warm, so I had to slide color temp in post a little to the blue side. But the Razr takes balanced color temp images; now I never have to fix that in post. In fact, most of the samples below are straight from the camera, no edits. (That said, the first ultrawide shot looks a bit warm compared to the wide shot next to it. Go figure.)
Macro
I’ve got to talk about this one since I love macro shots of flowers and bugs. The only other macro camera on a phone that I can compare with is the 2020 Moto G Power, the last Android phone I owned. It was kind of meh and often wasn’t worth the effort, so I preferred using the main lens a bit farther away and then cropping in post to get close to the subject. The image quality of that phone’s macro lens was a potato.
That is definitely not the case with the Razr. Of the few macro shots I’ve tried, I like them all. Instead of meh or maybe okay, they were all good to great with normal point-n-shoot effort. I can actually use the macro lens on this phone; it isn’t there just to say the phone has one. Win!
Night-mode
So far, I’m happy with night-mode. I first had this feature on the iPhone 11 and now the iPhone 12 Pro with LiDAR (night-mode portraits). Low-light and dark shots work well. The camera doesn’t take too long to focus or shoot. There’s a dedicated shooting mode called Night Vision that allows switching between all the lenses.
At the very least, it takes usable night-mode images of decent to good quality; low-light shots in the default photo mode fair well too. Sometimes, images can be a bit blurry or noisy and hit or miss, but otherwise it’s been pretty good. I’d say if night shots are critical for you, then you’d do better with a Pixel, Galaxy, or iPhone. For casual shooting, the Razr’s lunar powers are quite good.
Now I need to take a tripod to Arches National Park and try shooting the Milky Way with the Razr; be right back ;).
Selfie Camera
I hardly use the inner or front-facing selfie camera, but it seems to be at least as good as my iPhone 12 mini was. Instead, I use the main camera on the outside for selfies, not the one inside. The outside main camera is higher-quality and can easily be used while the phone is closed — nice! You launch the camera and view the image on the outer (cover) display where the cameras are. And the quality of selfies, with and without portrait mode, are great.
Camera Trick
A great feature of the Razr camera system are the displays. While shooting with the phone normally, the outside (cover) display, along with the lenses, is facing your subject. You have three options that are fun and quite useful:
Outer display off. It’s like a standard camera.
Outer display on, showing animated smiley faces. The faces change, attracting the attention of your subject and seems perfect for kids.
Outer display on, showing the exact same thing you see on the inner display, the framing of your subject(s). So people you’re capturing see themselves on the outer display. It gets their attention and can cause interesting faces.
Google Photos
This is the default software on Android that I use for managing photos. It’s great, though a bit simple. Yet it packs more editing features than it used to, which is very nice. It even allows editing the background blur and lighting location for portraits in post.
I find the combo of the Moto cameras and Google Photos to be more than satisfactory. The whole setup is well-rounded and makes me quite happy. I don’t feel like I compromised by switching from iPhone 12 Pro and iCloud Photos. With the Razr, most shots in most situations turn out very good.
Wrap-up
Overall, the camera system is on par with any modern mid-range phone I think. It likely won’t win a pixel-peeping shoot-out with iPhone, Pixel phone, or Galaxy phones, but it doesn’t really need to. It just needs to be good enough and reliable enough for most situations; indeed it is. Thanks, Moto! And thanks to God above all.
No comments:
Post a Comment