Home Unlabelled Day 8 – Camera Options on the Surface RT

Day 8 – Camera Options on the Surface RT

Surface RT for Teachers –
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

The past couple of days I have mentioned two image/photo editing apps, Fotor and Skitch Touch that are two great apps for teachers using the Surface RT. Teachers make a lot of visual content for their lessons and having options is always a good thing when it comes to creating content.

I mentioned that the Surface RT comes with two cameras, a back facing camera for taking pictures and videos, and a front facing camera that I use mainly for Skype. Another great feature of the Surface RT is its built-in kickstand that has just the right angle for making Skype calls.

Both cameras in the RT are 720p Lifecams and therefore are a little lower resolution than the 1080p cameras now on the market. Both of these cameras take an acceptable level of quality for classroom use but they are not high-resolution cameras by todays standards.

Many reviews will stop there and just give you the specifications but I know from experience that there is a big difference between writing about something and actually going out and using the product in the field. I think this may be one reason the tech press has dismissed the Surface RT, they have not used it for any length of time.

Continuing my experiment from yesterday I setup a scenario where a Biology Teacher went on a field trip and took along the Surface RT to document the trip with some pictures. Today, I did the same and took a little field trip of my own out into the woods with the Surface RT. Below is a screenshot of a flower I took with the RT.

In addition, I brought along my Canon S100 point and shoot camera that has a zoom lens and better optics. Below is a picture of the same flower with a tighter shot.

Can you tell the difference between the two? Besides the different framing can you tell that the resolution is much higher in the bottom picture? Select each picture and do a pinch and zoom. You will find there are more pixels in the bottom picture and therefore it is a little sharper, especially when you zoom in.

Here is another example, the picture below is at the edge of my cornfield and was taken using the back camera of the Surface RT.

Here is a similar shot taken with the Canon S100.

So, I have proven that a dedicated point and shoot camera that costs approximately $350 is better than the Surface RT camera that currently has an education price of $199. Not too surprising, but there is another trick that the RT has up its sleeve. I can easily take the pictures off of the Canon S100 and copy to the Pictures folder on the RT.

I used a microUSB cable and plugged one end into the Surface RT and the other end into the Canon S100, turned on the camera, went to the Desktop File Manager. The RT automatically recognized the camera and I was able to navigate to the SD card and copy files off the camera to the RT, easy peasy.

Once the pictures are on the Surface RT I can use Fotor and/or Skitch Touch to edit the photos to my hearts content. I could also have just as easily popped out the SD card on the S100 camera and put it in a SD card to USB adapter and copied the files directly off the SD card using the Surface RTs USB port. A very, very, handy feature to have on a tablet to share content from one source to another.

Below is a photo I took today using the S100 and copied to the RT. I used the Fotor app to add a couple of different effects just to show more two more examples of what the Surface RT can do.