Right then. Much ballyho about the iPhone 4 &the Droid X. It takes a lot of time & sustained effort to sift through all the vitriol & bullcrap filling up the Interweb to find out what's what. In this post I shall cover, rather reproduce the still photo captures obtained by the good people over at Boygeniusreport.com.

The Contenders:

The DROID X shoots in the 16:9 aspect ratio with an 8 megapixel, mechanical-shutter camera, which defaults to 6 megapixels. In the pictures the 6 MP & 8 MP shots are shown. Settings were otherwise left untouched.

The iPhone 4 on the other hand shoots in 4:3 with its 5 MP non-mechanical offering. No mucking about on the settings there either.

Shots of a soccer ball, glass candies, soapstone knot & a few tomatoes were taken in varied lighting conditions.

The Lowdown:

Now I'll spare you some effort of scrolling down the screen & tell you rightaway that Apple's device wins here. By a clear mile. How's that possible, you may ask? An 8 MP behemouth versus a 5 MP dwarf & David trumps Goliath? The reason, as given by the techies over at Mashable.com, is that the no. of pixels isn't the only variant when it comes to photo quality. The size of the pixels as well the technology on which they are based is just as important. The iPhone's optical sensor is based on a CMOS backlit illuminated device, which moves the wires from the front to the back of the sensor, thus allowing more light to strike the optical sensor. That naturally allows a clearer shot & warmer colors. So even with fewer megapixels the iPhone 4's camera manages to take photos with jaw-dropping clarity.

Steve Jobs is right about one thing. Trying to squeeze more megapixels onto the same space isn't the answer to the problem of getting better pictures. As you will see, the shots taken by the DROID X in both 6 MP & 8 MP modes fail to leave an impresion. That many pixels on such a small space & the quality is bound to deterioate. They're all blurred & the fact that it took 2-3 shots before an acceptable result was produced by the DROID X & only ONE shot for the iPhone 4 does NOT bode well for the Droid, which is an otherwise impressive piece of hardware. Maybe a software update might fix things but this is not the kind of lapse expected from the only real company from which Apple faces competition. Let's see how things develop. In the meantime, have a look at these photos & be the judge.