Camera, Benchmarks Etc

 

Camera:

There are two cameras on the Mini Studio, one in front and one in back. I tried to do screenshots of the camera interface but it wouldn’t let me saying storage was in use which it wasn’t that I know of.

The rear camera is 2mp with digital zoom.

Here’s a picture taken without zoom and it’s nice and clear.

Then here is it zoomed all the way in, I kept the tablet in the same place. Yes it’s digital zoom so it’s a little grainy, but not bad.

 

The front camera is only .3mp yes that’s point three megapixel.  It’s a picture of my shirt without zoom.

I then zoomed in on the cat and this one is very grainy. Again it’s digital zoom so it’s not the best.

Without using the zoom the front and rear cameras aren’t bad at all really. Both pictures were taken on the same day within minutes of each other, obviously I was in my car sitting waiting for my kids to come out of their karate class. Anyway it wasn’t exactly a bright day, it was a bit overcast, but it wasn’t dark either, it was around 5pm if I recall.

Neither camera has a flash so you’ll need to take that into account, but personally I don’t think I’ve ever used the cameras on any of the tablets I own for anything other than to test them to see if they actually work.

 

Benchmarks:

What would any type of review be without benchmarks?!

Well for benchmarks I just quickly ran Quadrant and AnTuTu on the Mini Studio and my Acer Iconia A500 and I was very much surprised by the results. Honestly I expected the Tegra based tablet to do better.

So here’s Quadrant, the Mini Studio scored 4044 while the Iconia only got 1838.

 

AnTuTu is just another benchmark.

Here the Mini Studio scored 11028 and the Iconia only got 5091.

 

 

I was planning to get this review up yesterday actually, but we had server issues here and my life interfered with that and it’s sort of a good thing as 3Dmark for Android just came out, so these are some last minute additions to the benchmarking section.

There are two tests in 3DMark for Android one is regular and one is extreme and I ran both of course.

The Mini Studio scored 2543 and the Iconia only got 1500. I’m really surprised by all the benchmarks actually, I thought the Tegra based Iconia would do much better than just plain dual core tablet like the Mini Studio. I don’t mean ‘plain’ as in bad, but it’s just the Tegra gets so much hype and I just expected much better results from it.

The next test is the extreme test

Here the Mini scored 1906 while the Iconia only get 773.

Again I’m surprised by the results, but oh well, now I’ve got a faster tablet.

 

A few quick observations to finish this off.

The little microUSB to USB adapter works, but I’d much rather just have a full-sized UBS port on the tablet. Already I’ve misplaced the adapter several times now, and it’s rather annoying. There is room for a full sized USB port on the right side, not sure why they didn’t add one there.

The aluminum alloy back sure looks nice but I’ve found that it scratches very easily. I’ve already got several noticeable scratches in it and I try and be very careful with my devices.

I mentioned the sound earlier, but it bears mentioning again. The tablet can get very loud with is very nice, but at the max level it get distorted. You can lower just slightly and the distortion will go away.

The unexplained lockups might be a small issue. In the time I’ve had it, about three weeks, it’s probably locked up about ten times on me. I never actually hit the reset button on the tablet. When it locks up you can just hold the power button down and it will turn off, then you can just turn it back on. I only had to do this I think three times in total, the other lockups just fixed themselves, the tablet came back to life after several seconds.

 

The price is under $200, $198 actually, and for that I think it’s well worth it. The more name brand tablets cost much much more and are pretty much the same as this one. As far as the iPad Mini goes, I’d rather have the Mini Studio.