Motorola RAZR i review

7. Still camera and quality, video camera and quality

A poor 8MP camera

The Motorola RAZR i is equipped with an 8MP camera which takes photos with a maximum resolution of 3264x2448 pixels. It's accompanied by a single-LED flash to help out in low-light situations.

The camera UI is minimalist in design. On the right side of the viewfinder there's the virtual shutter key flanked by the front/back and photo/video toggles. On the left, there's the gallery shortcut that displays the thumbnail of the last photo taken (with a counter of remaining photos next to it) and the digital zoom slider.

Motorola has been thoughtful enough to put a physical shutter button at its ideal location on the right hand side of the device. For some strange reason, however, the button is not of the two-position type and you can't use it for focusing. It's really a baffling decision to by Moto.

At the bottom, there's a retractable row of shortcuts - those include effects, scenes, shooting mode, exposure adjustment and flash control (on, off, auto).

The camera UI

From Modes, you can choose single shot, multi-shot (4MP photos), panorama or self-timer. Scenes offer things like Sport, Macro, HDR or an Auto mode which decides what's best without your explicit input. There's an option to geotag photos - that info can be stripped automatically when sharing photos.

There's a widescreen option that produces 16:9 photos. With it, both the viewfinder and the gallery images fit the screen aspect perfectly in full screen mode. However, the 16:9 aspect ratio means the photos turn out at roughly three quarters of the original resolution at about 6MP.

Arguably the worst part about the Motorola RAZR i camera is the image quality, though. Photos come out extremely noisy and with very little detail. White balance is off too and the colors are a bit too cold and contrast is quite poor. Overall, this is certainly one of the worst (and probably the worst) 8MP camera we have seen.

Motorola RAZR i camera samples

Photo quality comparison

The Motorola RAZR i joins the other shooters in our Photo Compare Tool. The tool's page will give you enough info on how to use it and what to look for.

Motorola RAZR i in our Photo Compare Tool

Video camera falls short of expectations, too

The Motorola RAZR i shoots 1080p videos at 30fps. The user interface looks identical to that of the still camera although some options have been changed. The Scenes option from the still camera has been replaced by Audio Scenes.

You have Stereo, Wind Reduction, Concert, Balanced and Front Facing audio scenes, which use the two microphones to adapt the audio to the specific situation. You still have the effects and exposure options and you can enable video stabilization.

The camcorder interface

Videos are stored in .MP4 files with bitrate hovering at 15Mbps. The sound that goes along with the video is stereo (128Kbps bitrate, 44.1kHz sampling rate).

Sadly, videos captured with the Motorola RAZR i are not much better than the still photos. The clips are smooth, but they lack detail and have a distinct oil painting look. The colors are once again a bit too cold and while videos aren't as useless as still photos, they are still among the worst 1080p samples we have seen recently.

Here is a video sample captured with the Motorola RAZR i and uploaded to YouTube for easy viewing.