The 903 has one of the most sophisticated cameras installed in any phone at the moment. It’s a CCD camera module with six lenses (five of them glass), capable of 3.2 megapixels with two times optical zoom, auto-focus and a flash LED. The camera boots up quickly, starting within 1.5 seconds. There is also the digital camera mode of taking pictures, explained earlier, that makes it even easier to take them. In digital camera mode you use the side buttons to operate the phone, and the camera shutter button is a two stage button – pressing it halfway locks the focus, and all the way will take a photo.

Auto-focus can be adjusted manually or locked in macro mode as well. If you’re using the phone the old fashioned way to take pictures (i.e. with the phone opened and using the keypad), pressing the centre button will make the camera auto-focus and take the picture in one operation. You can also lock the focus separately using the dial key, and then taking the photo with the centre button afterwards – this is helpful when preparing for a scene that may last only a few seconds.

The 903 offers the following seven resolutions for taking pictures:

1536x2048 pixels
1200x1600 pixels
960x1280 pixels
768x1024 pixels
640x480 pixels
320x240 pixels
160x120 pixels


You can take pictures at three different levels of JPEG compression: Normal, Fine and Super Fine. The optical zoom can be used on all resolutions, although you can’t stop at any position between 1x and 2x; it’s either one or the other. You can digitally zoom in up to 24x when shooting at 120x160 resolution, and when combined with the optical zoom, it means you can zoom at up to 48x. As in previous Sharp phones, digital zoom doesn’t work at full resolution, meaning the digital zoom can’t degrade pictures – it will use the sensor’s large size to preserve picture quality.

White balance is automatic and can’t be manually adjusted, but you can choose from eight preset scenes to affect the way a picture is taken. Those scenes are ‘Automatic’, ‘Night’, ‘Sports’, ‘Characters’ (as in text), ‘Pet’, ‘Against Sun’, ‘Portrait’ and ‘Portrait in Dark’. The scenes work well in their allotted situation. For example, the ‘Characters’ scene increases contrast so that text is easily visible, while the ‘Pet’ scene increases ISO sensitivity so that the camera can handle high movement better (less blur, but the trade-off is more picture noise). There is also a standard effects option to apply sepia, negative, monochrome and sketch themes to a picture (on pictures 240x320 pixels or smaller only).

You can adjust picture exposure between -2 and +2, and you can set a delay timer of ten seconds to take a picture. There are many features available for pictures 240x320 pixels or smaller. These include a multishot mode that can take four pictures (also available at 480x640), nine pictures, an overlapped picture and ‘bracket mode’, where the phone takes nine pictures with various brightness and flash LED colours used. You can also add frames to a picture too.

Pictures save onto the internal memory or memory card, and can take as much as one megabyte per picture when saved at full resolution in super fine quality. Pictures take up to eight seconds to save in digital camera mode, and an astonishing 19 seconds when the flip is opened the old fashioned way. I don’t know why there is such a large difference in saving time between the two modes, but nonetheless it’s a long time to wait for a picture to save.

The picture quality of the 903 is astonishing – it is so good that it puts some entry level cameras to shame. For those of you around the world who bought a 902 and were disappointed with its camera quality, rest assured, the 903’s performance leaves the 902’s for dead. This is definitely the first true camera phone that would allow you to leave your camera at home when going out. In the daytime it takes excellent photos. At night it takes standard ones though – without a dedicated flash to help it must rely on the included flash LED to brighten up rooms, and this is only good up to a metre or two in front of the phone. Also there is a permanent, loud shutter sound to discourage immoral picture taking, although you can change it between three different ones.

I should also mention that the 903 has a picture editor that is more advanced than previous Sharp phones. You can change the file format between JPEG and PNG, enlarge or reduce a photo, retouch it (add an effect such as ripples, emboss and oil painting), or use the face arrange application to self portraits – this one lets you change the expression of the person in the picture and is very amusing to use. You can make the person happy, angry, sad, give them big eyes and burning eyes, or even turn them into an aristocrat. It’s very funny. You can merge pictures into a panorama image and also add a frame to a picture. Finally, you can rotate one too. Keep in mind that a lot of these functions require the source picture to be 320x240 pixels, or will produce an image at that size, so they are more for amusement than actually being useful.

Video recording is also supported at three resolutions – 128x96, 176x144, and 320x240 pixels. The first two can be used for video messages, where video can be recorded for up to a minute, depending on your carrier’s MMS size limit and the quality of the video (Vodafone Australia supports up to 300kb per message). The last one can be used to record long videos up to 30 minutes (in 3GP mode) or as long as the SD card allows (in ASF SD Video mode), and produces videos with 15 frames per second. The options for exposure brightness, focus lock and self-timer can be used for videos, and zooming during videos – both optical and digital – work as well. If you zoom optically during a video the sound will mute as the optical zoom’s motor is very loud and would overpower all the video’s audio otherwise. However, I found digital zoom effective enough during video recording that I turned the optical zoom off altogether. Even at 320x240 pixels, digital zoom works up to 4.23 times.

Video 3 - Doggy

Sharp 903

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Optical Zoom with the Sharp 903

Table of contents:

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