Pretty much any cell phone you'd buy today comes with a digital camera, but only a few are good enough to take the place of even a cheap point-and-shoot. It can be tricky to sniff out which phones really fall into that category. Highly advertised features, like a mass of megapixels and multiple settings, do not always add up to a solid camera. My favorite of the bunch is the 8-megapixel Samsung Memoir, which packs an impressive set of camera and phone functions into a slick package. The Memoir sports a crisp touch screen that is helpful for accessing the camera's numerous features. Those include mosaic and panorama shooting modes, as well as a feature that can warn you when one of your photo subjects blinked in a picture. Taking photos is simple with the dedicated capture and zoom buttons on one side. The Memoir's flash can handle darker scenes fairly well, too. Here's a look at some other camera phones. Palm Pre The Pre is a strong smart phone, and on closer inspection I learned it also has a great, simple camera. The Pre's 3-megapixel camera is frill-free: Its only real feature is the ability to turn its flash on or off or put it on auto. But what the Pre shoots, it shoots well. The handset had the least amount of shutter lag of any camera phone I tried, and did a good job of adjusting the brightness of shots in different lighting situations. It generally produced sharp, color-rich photos. Nokia N97 The only unlocked phone I tested, the Nokia N97 crams a great digital camera and mess of features into a fairly chunky but still pocketable package. The N97, which has a big, bright touch screen and easy-to-use slide-out QWERTY keyboard on its side, sports a 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens on the back and extremely bright dual LED flash. The camera took great shots in bright and low light, and I had fun playing with the different settings, which range from simple color filters to light sensitivity and image sharpness options.The digital zoom wasn't that impressive, as it seemed to blur photos. There is plenty of space to store the photos you do like, though, as the phone includes 32 gigabytes of internal memory. Sony Ericsson C905a With its 8-megapixel camera and pretty low price, the silver Sony Ericsson C905a is a fair option. The handset is thick but compact, with a slide-out keypad on the bottom. There's no touch screen on the C905a, but there are plenty of buttons to help you along: Dedicated “scenes” and “shoot mode” buttons let you fine-tune the light settings and types of shots. The C905a's 16x digital zoom was more helpful than I expected, and it seemed to work more fluidly and produce less blurry images than some other handsets. I was very impressed with the clarity of some photos I took, though the colors could have been a bit brighter. If you like to snap shots quickly, the C905a may annoy you, though, as it doesn't have the quickest response time.
