Samsung Focus S photos and camera test

If you think you've seen this design before, you'd be right. It's essentially the Samsung Galaxy S II for AT&T, but in Windows Phone, rather than Android, form. To top it off, the Samsung Focus S may just be the best all-around Windows Phone we've seen.

It starts with a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen with 800x480-pixel resolution (WVGA). (Read the full Samsung Focus S review here.)

It has an 8-megapixel camera on the back, and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front. (Read the full Samsung Focus S review here.)

The phone comes in at just over 0.3 inch thick, making it extremely thin. It's also very light. It has 16GB of internal storage and a 1.4GHz processor. (Read the full Samsung Focus S review here.)

The only drawback to the Super AMOLED Plus screen is that it could amplify photos, making them look better on the phone than they do in real life. To test the camera quality, I took photos using default settings (like of this grilled-cheese joint), then transferred pictures to the computer. This outdoor photo, like all these photos, has been resized, but remains otherwise untouched.

The Focus S, like many other phones bearing Samsung's 8-megapixel camera, has a tendency to oversaturate some colors, particularly greens and reds. This photo, however, looks pretty true to life in terms of color.

This photo, taken outdoors in early morning light, was the most disappointing in terms of focus. Results were the same in two separate but successive shots.

The camera took nice shots, but didn't capture the distinct edges as well as I had hoped.

I turned the sharpness setting from the default, medium sharpness, to maximum sharpness to achieve a clearer shot that's very good. If you forget to save the settings, the camera returns to the defaults after each tweak.

Back on the default settings, medium sharpness was just fine for these metal hookups protruding from a nearby building.

The camera faithfully captured the yellow here, as well as the fabric's texture.

Poltergeists must have hopped into this photo, taken indoors with artificial lighting. The CNET "C" doesn't have a habit of emitting any sort of blue light; in fact, the center of the "C" is completely white.

This indoor photo, taken under artificial lighting, shows the phone's default sharpness.

Here it is again, with high sharpness selected.

This time I used the maximum setting.

Here's another indoor shot taken with maximum sharpness.

I also tested out the 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. I came out a little more grayed-out than in real life. (Read the full Samsung Focus S review here.)