The Sony Ericsson W580i is equipped with a run of the mill 2mpx digital camera with digital zoom and a mediocre set of advanced functionality. As the handset is only 2G compatible, there is no forward-facing camera.

The camera is located on the back of the top half of the slider, and therefore it cannot be used when the handset is closed. There is no flash on the W580i, so images taken in low light can be aided slightly by the night mode function – don’t expect any miracles though! The W580i does not have a dedicated camera button, so the application must be launched by selecting the function from the main menu.

Images can be captured at up to 1600 x 1200 pixels resolution. Only two alternative resolutions are offered, 1280 x 960 (1.3mpx) and 640 x 480 (VGA). JPEG compression (quality) can be set at fine or normal. A 2mpx image of fine quality is approximately 250-300KB, and at normal quality around 150-200KB.

Unfortunately there is no flash on the W580i, so if you wish to capture images at night or in low light you will need to rely on the night mode functionality, which can produce less than amazing image quality.

The W580i has 4x digital zoom, but the zoom feature is disabled in the 2mpx and 1.3mpx resolution settings. To zoom in, simply press the up or down navigational buttons. Other features of the viewfinder application include effects (sepia, black and white, and negative), panorama mode, and frames mode. Panorama mode allows you to take 3 images that are stitched together by the handset after capture. In frames mode a cartoonish image is overlayed on the image captured by the camera. A burst mode is also offered.

Video capture is also supported by the W580i’s camera. I couldn’t capture any example shots to attach to this review, but video can be recorded at 176 x 144 pixels or 128 x 96 pixels. Video can be limited to 10 seconds (perfect for MMS) or unlimited (only limited by the amount of free memory). The video is captured in 3GPP format and is not of amazing quality.

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Shake it! Sony Ericsson W580i

Table of contents:

Overview (Page 1)
Camera & Video performance (Page 2)
Major features (Page 3)
Problems/Issues (Page 4)
In Summary/Checklist (Page 5)