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Anyone that's picked up a Samsung phone recently, especially the higher end models, can't help but notice that the cameras are pretty good on them nowadays.
That tradition has continued into the Samsung H1, although perhaps not in the same league as the likes of the Tocco Ultra Edition or the Pixon12.
What we do like though is the range of options for taking photographs – and the good news is most of them actually work.
That might sound comical, but there have been far too many instances of manufacturers putting arbitrary features on their cameraphones that essentially do nothing.
The Samsung H1's camera is fired up by pressing the shutter button on the side, sending those used to Samsung phones into a familiar camera UI.
Basically, it's well laid out, and the necessary functions such as auto-focus and anti-shake are all laid out ready for you, so all you need to do is point and shoot.
However, should you want to get a little bit more classy then you can press the SCN icon (which is an abbreviation of 'Scene'; you can see what they did there).
This gives you 12 options to choose from, including night view, landscape shots and firework capture (with the latter actually proving useful this time of year).
And the nice tweak on the H1 is when you have the list of scene icons, no longer does pressing them activate them.
Now you have to enter it to activate it, making choosing what you're after a lot easier.
We can vouch that the fireworks and bright light options worked very well on the camera, and although night mode was physically incapable of shooting anything without making it look a smeary mess, we've yet to find a phone that can do this well.
The single LED flash is bright without being overly so, although trying to take a picture of a group of your friends in dark situations is nigh on impossible.
Shutter speed is good, although saving the picture takes a bit too long. And if you're into a bit of post production then you can activate the image manager to draw squiggly lines or write text all over your lovely and clean picture.
We're of the opinion that 5MP is a perfectly reasonable number for a phone, and that appears to be the case here. We can't help but feel that a better lens would have been nice on this camera, as is the case with other Samsung phones.
Video
Are you ready for a shock? This phone can record in 720p HD. We were completely unaware of this fact, which begs the question – why wasn't this a key spec when the phone was announced?
The Samsung i8910HD has similar functionality (with possibly the same 24fps recording) and that was huge – it even made it into the name of the phone.
And we're glad to say video appears to be of a comparable quality, even on larger screens. We're not sure why it's on here, as a 5MP camera without even the usual Samsung bells and whistles is hardly the best advert for top notch video capture, but we're still glad it's there.
