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I'll save you some time and make this clear from the start: if you want a good camera on your phone, don't buy the Moto E.
If you're still with me and want specifics on why it's so bad then for a start how about the fact that it has no flash, there's no front facing camera, no autofocus and the main snapper is only 5 megapixels.
When you come to actually taking photos you'll find there aren't many options or modes to play with either. Swiping in from the right of the screen will launch the gallery, while swiping in from the left reveals a dial with the few options the camera does provide.
These take the form of HDR mode, panorama, adjusting the exposure, adding location data, choosing whether to shoot in 16:9 or 4:3 and choosing whether to save photos to the phone or microSD card.
It's not a terrible selection of options for a budget smartphone, but there's no scene modes other than the aforementioned panorama and HDR, no editing tools and no ability to change the white balance or ISO.
I will at least say that having it on a dial that you swipe to access keeps the screen free of clutter. But that's a small positive point amongst a sea of negatives.
There's no dedicated shutter button so you take a photo just by tapping on the screen and as there's no autofocus it doesn't matter where you tap.
That simplifies the act of taking photos and goes some way to making up for the absence of a front-facing camera, since you can easily just point the camera at yourself and tap the screen to take a picture. But it also means you can't focus on a specific subject and you can forget about close-ups.
One nice feature is that you can rapidly take multiple photos by holding your finger on the screen. Though while I say rapid the shutter isn't the fastest out there and when using HDR mode it becomes noticeably slow.
At least launching the camera is quite fast. As well as there being an app for it you can also start it straight from the lock screen by swiping in from the right. That speed is the only thing it really has going for it though, because unless every second counts you'd be far better off grabbing your compact.
It's unreasonable to expect a great camera for this money, but the Nokia Lumia 520 and EE Kestrel both best it, as do most other smartphones.
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