Acer Liquid E3 Review - Camera Review

Acer Liquid E3: Camera

The E3 has a 13-megapixel camera, technically putting it ahead of similarly priced phones at least on megapixel count, though such numbers rarely tell the whole story. There’s also an LED flash to aid low-light shooting and the 2-megapixel front-facing camera also gets the LED flash treatment, something you don’t see often.

As our test shots show, though (see right), it’s not going to dramatically boost selfie quality.

For a sub-£200 phone, camera quality is strong when you have enough light. When you need to shoot in more demanding situations, things get trickier.

The camera app is pretty standard fare. It’s not too taxing to fiddle around with features and use and it’s already set up to shoot in its optimum resolution. There are a number of modes Acer includes for manual and automatic shooting, like adjusting ISO to help low light shots, a series of of white balance options and a host of Scene modes including one for shooting in snow.

There’s also an interesting Auto Focus mode with an Exposure control and Quick Touch shot mode to speed up taking images.

Sadly, results vary too much normal conditions. At times the camera can struggle to focus correctly and other times it delivers sharp images with accurate colours. Images can often look a little muted and there’s no HDR mode to give photos a bump up quality.

In good light, the 13-megapixel can capture sharp images

It’s not perfect up close and the autofocus can struggle at times

Here’s a better example of a more successful close-up image

Putting the ring-style LED flash to the test, it’s similar to the one found on the Liquid S2 and in tandem with the autofocus doesn’t produce exceptionally sharp results. It’s bright can still be a bit noisy.

 

The bright LED flash can sometimes hamper the image quality and produce some noise

When you want to go from stills to moving images, there’s electronic image stabilization to keep things steady, an option to turn off the microphone, a time lapse interval mode and some off live effects that only work when your phone is on a steady surface and there’s no movement.
Video quality is very average and audio quality doesn’t impress.