Acer CloudMobile S500 review: Out of the blue

The 8MP camera isn't the best

The Acer CloudMobile S500 has an 8 megapixel auto-focus snapper and coupled with a single LED flash. It's capable of producing stills with a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels.

The camera interface features two taskbars on either side of the viewfinder. On the left you get four shortcuts to various settings, while the still camera/camcorder toggle, the virtual shutter and a thumbnail of the last photo taken are on the right.

The menu key brings a couple of pages of extra settings - scenes, resolution, and geotagging among others.

The camera interface

The image quality is not the best we've seen for the class. There's a good deal of noise to deal with, while the image itself is not the sharpest, and the colors are somewhat inaccurate. The contrast ratio is good but not great. There was a good amount of adjustment made by the lens before it managed to focus, too.

Macro images came out well, with good detail overall. Unfortunately, a fair amount of noise is present in them too.

Acer CloudMobile S500 camera samples

Image quality comparison

The standard test shots from the CloudMobile S500 are in our Photo Compare Tool database. The synthetic resolution chart shows average results. There are some oversharpening halos here, and while the noise reduction has smeared the grass and gravel in the second chart, they are still recognizable. The third chart has accurate white balance, but subdued colors under artificial lighting.

The Acer CloudMobile S500 in our Photo Compare Tool

FullHD video recording

The Acer CloudMobile S500 captures 1080p video at around 30fps.

The camcorder has the same interface as the still camera and most of the same settings.

Switching to camcorder mode

Videos are recorded in 3GP files with a bit rate of 12.1 Mbps and stereo AAC sound (96Kbps, 48kHz). The resolved detail is quite decent and the videos are smooth, although the same color and fidelity issues persist.

Check out this 1080p video sample we shot with the Acer CloudMobile S500:

If you want to look closer at the video quality, you can download this untouched 1080p@30fps sample, taken straight off the device.

Video quality comparison

The Acer CloudMobile S500 shoots 1080p which get the job done, but aren't the best we've seen. Color reproduction is a little too intense, and you can see a pretty visible pink spot in the ISO chart. The level of detail isn't that high, either.

The Acer CloudMobile S500 in our Photo Compare Tool