Gionee Elife S5.1 Camera Review, Capture Samples

The 8-megapixel camera on the Gionee Elife S5.1’s back is an absolute beauty for the number. For such thickness, usually one would expect the camera module to have compromised sensors and only the 8-megapixel lens to do not much to call itself a decent camera set. But, we actually liked the camera for the main reason being its ability to reproduce colors, and the credits should be shared by the software part as well.

The camera app doesn’t differ from the one in the other Elife series smartphones having the Amigo UI. There is a standard section having a lot of settings, including HDR, Auto Scene, Sound, Geo tagging, Self Timer, Capture Mode (normal, V-sign shot, touch shot, smile shot), Volume keys usage, picture size (maximum of 8-megapixels) and Anti-banding settings.

The volume keys can be used for either shooting, or zooming in, or use them as they are called – as volume up / down functions. The quality can be switched between 8-megapixel, 6-megapixel (full screen), 5-megapixel or 4-megapixel. Self timer can be set to 2, 5, or 10 seconds.

HDR brings out some difference, and that is noticeable. But it is not the easiest to use the mode always, because it does take more than a second to capture and process the image. But for a normal capture, it is too fast, very much better than the shutter speed on the Gionee Elife E7.

As far as the camera capture is concerned, the phone doesn’t do the best of the job out there, especially when comparing with the cameras on the Xiaomi Redmi 1s and Asus Zenfone 5. But the color reproduction is excellent, with the natural objects being portrayed beautifully, and the only issue we see on the tests is the shakiness, where even a little shaky hand will result in a distorted picture.

A sample capture in not-so-bright condition.

There is one single switch to toggle between Normal and Panorama, and the panorama works quite fine, only if you are sticking to the center line, unlike some other devices with a wider lens, which try to bring out a better capture without distortions, or demarcated lines between the frames.

The front 5-megapixel shooter is a fixed focus one, thus you cannot try to prompt it to focus on you and do some defocus magic for the background. Still, the capturing was quite good and the speed again was very fast, as you don’t see it taking even a little time before capturing the photo.

So overall, the camera on the Gionee Elife S5.1 is not the perfect of the 8-megapixel cameras out there, but still, there is nothing really bad about it except for the shaky pictures due to lack of any stabilization. The front facing camera as well does a pretty decent capturing.