Lately, I have been getting some requests for reviewing the cameras in the smartphones. It has made me create a stress test for these new devices. I have christened this test ‘Travelure Torture Test’ (T3). InFocus Turbo 5 is the first VoLTE Smartphone I review with it, as that is the one who reached out for a review most recently. I was told that Foxconn and InFocus had come together to create Turbo 5.
Testing InFocus Turbo 5 with Travelure Torture Test (T3)
(To know what is Travelure Torture Test (T3), please scroll down. Broadly speaking, it is about testing the dynamic range resolving capability of a camera.)
For this test, I chose the scenes that had:
- Very bright and very dark areas (Typically, an indoor scene with ambient light coming in from a door or a window qualifies for this. The ambient light will only illuminate part of the scene.)
- A lit up room with a blue-hour outdoors in the same frame (a photograph shot from inside a lit-up room that also captures the outdoors through a door or a window
- An ‘against the light’ shot that typically would be handled by the camera in auto-mode as a silhouette
My Observations
As I opened a sealed box of InFocus Turbo 5, I saw an exclusive and classy Mocha Gold coloured smartphone inside. It had a comfortable screen size (5.2″). As I powered it on, I realised its battery was at 90% charge. Given the fact that it must have been packaged at least a few weeks ago, it silently spoke a lot about its powerful battery and its charge-retention in standby mode.
Without any further ado, I embarked on the task of making some photographs with Turbo 5. As per the criteria mentioned above, the scenes I went after were:
Scene 1:
While the wall on the right and the cabinet on the left gets ambient light from my French window, the banquet remains in relative darkness. I metered for the darker area (touched that area on the screen till that area started to look brighter). As I pressed the trigger, I realised this phone was truly smart – its HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode kicked in. As a result, the photograph it clicked was similar to the ones you would get after adequate post-processing in a decent editing software.
My rating on T3: 4/5
Scene 2:
The lights are on. The sky outside is getting darker. And the flowers are in front of the light. What will we get? Silhouette of flowers? Or, a colourful image as seen by the eye? Well, I was pleased that I got the latter!
My Rating: 4/5
Scene 3:
Shoot colourful objects directly against the light. I shot some flowers in the vase while it was framed against a sunlit French window. Here, what surprised me were the smarts built into the phone. Since the scene lighting was impossible for any camera to handle, it activated the flash and clicked a near-perfect image – almost as the human eye would see it!
Another shot of my bar cabinet also triggered a similar response from InFocus Turbo 5.
My Rating: 4.5/5
Overall Travelure Torture Test (T3) Score: 4.17/5
Add to that the following:
- A 3GB RAM (That’s what an iPhone 7Plus has)
- A fingerprint smartphone
- Voice over Long Term Evolution (or a VoLTE smartphone)
- A 5000 mAh Battery
- Priced at just under INR 8000
And you’d immediately realise that InFocus Turbo 5 is the best smartphone below 8000 INR. By the way, it is available in 2 models – 2GB RAM/16GB ROM (Rs 6999) and 3GB RAM/32GB ROM (Rs 7999). Given its powerful battery and a decent camera, it can be your trusted travel companion.
You may purchase it HERE!
What is Travelure Torture Test (T3)
In photography, the challenge faced by cameras can be summed up in one phrase – Limited Dynamic Range. Dynamic Range (DR) is the photography jargon that is used to indicate the range of the darkest to the brightest point in a given photographic frame.
While human eye has a 20-stop dynamic range, in most present-day cameras, it hovers between 9 and 13 stops.
Travelure Torture Test (T3) is all about testing a camera (even a 4G Smartphone camera) for its Dynamic Range.
Here are two samples of high dynamic range shots.
Understanding Dynamic Range
In photography, the term – Stop of Light – is used to indicate either halving or doubling the amount of light. To say that a camera has a dynamic range of 10-stops means it can handle the range from X amount of light to 1024X amount of light in a single frame (where X is the darkest and 1024X is the brightest point in that frame). We arrive at this 1024X by simply doubling the X ten times (X, 2X, 4X, 8X…. 1024X).
Even the most competent cameras with a DR of 13-stops can only handle a range of light from X to 8192X.
In comparison, this DR of the human eye is from X to 1,048,576X (20-stops).
It means we are able to see the darkest and the brightest part of the scene vividly, while the camera struggles to do justice to this wide range of reflected light in a frame.
Little wonder the images clicked by a camera in high dynamic range situations fail to come close to what we see with our eyes.
So, T3 checks out the competence of a camera on its dynamic range handling capability.
