A perfect locale to road test a cell phone camera is the Clarion Alley in the Mission District of San Francisco. An assault on the senses, the colorful murals that dot this block are part of the Clarion Alley project that began back in 1992. The street art exemplifies the urban graffiti aesthetic of San Francisco's New Mission School.

Today's Camera Road Test: Pantech Crossover

Camera Stats: It's  a 3 megapixels, backfacing, auto-focus camera with a 4x zoom. Not one of AT&T's high-end devices, the Pantech Crossover is powered by a 600MHz processor. Despite that, it actually offers a decent photographing experience than one would initially expect. With that said, let's head towards Clarion Alley and get this Pantech Crossover snapping some photos.

In San Francisco, the walls of buildings are canvases as the city is blazed with world-renowned murals. Graffiti artists such as Banksy, Twist, and Shepard Fairey have made the sides of buildings their focal point for their bold artist statements.  

What a perfect arena to test the color saturation of the Crossover.

The camera opens by pressing the dedicated camera button on the home screen. It's a good thing these murals are stationary; the camera opens a little bit on the slow side: roughly in the 2.5 - 3.0 seconds arena. If you're in a situation where you need to whip out your camera and snap a quick shot - chances are you might miss it.

With only 3 megapixels, I wasn't expecting much from the Crossover, but I was pleasantly surprised by the image quality. Color and white balance looked pretty descent, and the exposure was generally accurate.

One annoying thing about the Crossover: once you snap a photo, it doesn't go back to camera shooting mode; you have to exit from the snapped image to take your next photo. Once again, bad when wanting to shoot quickly on the fly.

The auto-focus really sharpens images; especially when in motion. I took the above image while jumping in the air (people did stare at me) and it captured the details of this tree woman very well.

Here's a cool feature I liked: you have two options for zoom. You can manually do it with the buttons on the side of the phone, or you can use the touchscreen slider on the interface. Above is Clarion Alley in both phases of zoom. From a long distance, zooming in makes the sort of grainy and you lose detail.

But when closer to the subject, the Crossover picks up descent detail, such as this man with a gun to his head, when zoomed in all the way; though you do lose some color saturation.

Brightness/contrast feature works the same way as the zoom. An interesting feature is the ability to tap the screen to bring up the effects panel. The only problem is the camera doesn't go back to the default setting after snapping a photo; you have to exit the effect to get back to the original setting. Annoying!

Effect filters are all the rage with camera phones. The Crossover offers mono, sepia, and negative. (How often would you want to use a negative filter?) Again, the annoying part is the camera doesn't go back to the default setting after taking a photo with a filter. If you're snapping an event, and need a lot of quick photos, it's probably best to avoid the filters.

Camera Conclusion: I wasn't expecting much from the Pantech Crossover, but I ended up pleasantly surprised by one of AT&T's lower-end cell phones. The main problem is there're too many extra steps you have to take between settings.