The 8MP camera and the video player
Since the imagery has stayed identical within the Galaxy S II's family, the Skyrocket's camera retains the same eight megapixel sensor and innovative UI. This means the sensor had a few struggles in the narrow dynamic range, causing washed-out images in direct sunlight and murky ones in low-light conditions. In-between, however, only the 12MP Nokia N8 camera rivals this series' imagery.
Fortunately, you have a plethora of settings you can tweak to make the best of those extremes, such as white balance, ISO, metering, focus mode, exposure and contrast, among plenty others. And even better, you can customize your preferences, giving you the chance to put the ones you use most into a handy sidebar on the left side of the screen.
The Skyrocket also has the same stellar 1080p video capture performance we've grown used to loving in the series, with quality that matches its counterparts. But just like on the T-Mobile version, the camera would occasionally take an extra second or two to find its focus in the middle of a video. This happens mainly when changing scenery, as we noticed that the focus generally locked when filming a location for a lengthy amount of time.
Full HD video camera
The video camera interface is identical to the still camera one. You get the same customizable panel on the left for four shortcuts. The video camera can record video using the front facing camera too (resolution is limited to VGA).
The Full HD videos are first-rate full of detail, low in noise and generally, nice and smooth. However one problem here is the continuous auto focus tends to hunt quite a lot during video recording which can be a bugger if there are lots of moving object in the scene.
A idiosyncrasy is that when shooting Full HD videos you have a narrower field of view than that of the still camera. Perhaps Samsung are using the same trick as Apple in the iPhone 4: the camcorder uses only the center of the 8MP sensor instead of shooting with the whole surface and having to scale it down to 1080p putting extra strain on the CPU. In 720p video capture mode however Samsung are making use of the whole sensor and as a result you have the same wide field of view as the still camera (about 30mm).
The camcorder features continuous autofocus, which is smooth though a bit slow at times.
Other than those peculiarities, the video quality is very good at 1080p – the .MP4 files come with 17Mbps bitrate and have a lot of detail. The framerate is quite consistent – there are no dropped or duplicated frames. Keep in mind that Full HD videos gobble up a lot of storage – a minute of video will easily top 100MB of file size.
