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    New T-Mobile myTouch smartphones only shoot 3.9 megapixels, not 5 as advertised

    New T-Mobile myTouch smartphones only shoot 3.9 megapixels, not 5 as advertised

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    T-Mobile's new myTouch smartphones are said to have 5-megapixel cameras, but the camera app only lets users shoot 3.9-megapixel images at its top setting.

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    T-Mobile MyTouch and Q
    T-Mobile MyTouch and Q

    T-Mobile's new myTouch and myTouch Q smartphones are said to have 5-megapixel cameras, but some digging by Consumer Reports has revealed that they are only capable of shooting 3.9-megapixel images at their highest settings. The problem apparently lies in how the images are cropped by the camera app — the widescreen aspect ratio lops the top and bottom off of the image, effectively lowering the picture's resolution.

    We weren't very impressed with the cameras on either myTouch models in our recent review, but it never feels good to not be able to record the image resolution promised on a phone's spec sheet. Revisiting our review devices, we were able to confirm Consumer Reports' findings: even though the top resolution option in the camera app is labeled as "5M Pixels", the resulting images have a resolution of 2560 x 1536 pixels, or just under 4 megapixels.

    It's very likely that the myTouch phones have 5-megapixel sensors inside of them, and if the camera app captured a 4:3 aspect ratio picture instead of the roughly 16:9 image that it currently does, it would probably be a full 5-megapixel image. This is something that can certainly be fixed with a software update, so hopefully T-Mobile and Huawei are already working on it.