DSLR-like smartphone brings back Kodak nostalgia

It is widely acknowledged that cameras are one of the most important features of smartphones. A significant amount of attention is put into ensuring smartphone cameras take quality photos. Good cameras are defining features of flagship handsets from Apple, Samsung and Google. Efforts to turn these units into cameras and vice versa have not been very successful, though. Now, there is a new one called the Kodak Ektra smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Ektra phone was made by a company called Bullitt Group, which licenses the Kodak name. Kodak has been fighting to stay relevant since digital photography caught up with film in quality and convenience. The Ektra was clearly meant to be a great point-and-shoot camera with all the perks of being an Android phone. The camera has a 21MP sensor with f2.0 aperture, and can capture 4K videos. The software brings a range of manual camera settings to the phone, including a DSLR dial off to the side. The model also has a 13MP front-facing camera.

This is not the first smartphone with manual camera controls. Other companies have used this to entice photographers. The difficulty has always been convincing people to use manual controls on their smartphones when devices like the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phones take such good photos without any tweaking.

As a handset, the Ektra might have a hard time standing out based on specifications alone. It runs on a decacore MediaTek processor instead of a more popular option from Qualcomm. It has 3GB of RAM, a 3,000mAh battery, and 32GB of internal storage with a microSD card slot. The 5in screen uses a 1080p IPS display. These specs are not bad, but they are far from best-in-class. Photographers might be willing to overlook this if the camera were truly superb, but an early review from Digital Trends suggests there is still some shutter lag and the pictures are not necessarily the greatest of any smartphone. The shutter lag can probably be addressed in a software update, but at a cost of about $550, many people might not be willing totake the dive.

Many China makers are already addressing the manual camera controls through software for less money than what Bullitt is charging. This has been a standard feature in the OnePlus phones, for example. The latest OnePlus 3T starts at $440. It is easy for China companies to use better camera sensors, as they do all the time, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for smartphone makers abroad to make something unique for more money than what China makers charge.