The Dell Venue 10 7040 Review

Camera

Dell's Venue tablets have served as a showcase for Intel's RealSense technology. I've already looked at the measurements and visual effects you can do with RealSense in my review of the Venue 8, so I won't spend any time going over it again. It also happens that both the camera application and camera sensors on the Venue 10 are identical to those of the Venue 8. You can take a look at the chart below for a refresher of what sensors and resolutions we're dealing with.

You can click here to see my thoughts on Intel RealSense and Dell's camera app from my Venue 8 review. A quick summary is that the app offers controls for exposure bracketing, ISO, white balance, as well as a few other settings.The default picture size is set to a 16:9 crop by default, despite the fact that the OV8858 is a 4:3 sensor, and so to get the full resolution and vertical field of view the user should change that to 4:3 right away. There's really nothing wrong with the app, although I would appreciate some finer control over ISO.

The Venue 10 uses the same rear-facing sensor as the Venue 8, and unfortunately this is not a good thing. Photo quality is unchanged from the Venue 8, and it's just not near as good as the competition. Although the Venue 10, Nexus 9, and iPad Air 2 all have 8MP sensors with 1.12 µm pixels, the image quality on the Venue 8 is not as good as the Nexus 9, and not even close to the iPad Air 2. In the above scene you can see that even though the Venue 10 actually had more light in the scene as a result of the clouds moving, there's far less detail throughout the entire frame. In particular, the foliage has almost no detail, and the image processing makes the parts of them that are in the shadows completely black.

While I'm hardly a tablet photographer, there are a number of applications that can use a tablet's camera for purposes other than photography. When you're trying to compete in the high end tablet market there's really no room to lag behind the competition in any aspect, including camera quality. The iPad Air 2 is actually capable of taking some good photos when there's enough lighting, and the Venue 10's image quality simply isn't at that level.

Video Quality

Something I realized I had overlooked with the Venue 8 review was the quality of video recording. Since the Venue 10 uses the same camera sensor and ISP, I thought I would take this opportunity to rectify that. The Venue 10 can record 1080p video at 30fps. My last experience with video recording on an Intel device was less than exceptional, and I was hopeful that Dell handled it better.

To be frank, the video output on the Venue 10 is just completely unacceptable. In terms of the visual quality it's actually not bad, but the footage is extremely shaky. It doesn't look like Dell is employing any form of EIS to stablize the video here. In addition, the frame rate is very erratic, often dropping below 30fps. The biggest problem of all is that the video will simply freeze and drop all of its frames at times. If I had to make a guess about what's going on, I would say that whatever buffer Dell is writing to is being filled and can't be cleared fast enough, so the video simply freezes until it can continue to write frames. I seriously doubt that video capture was ever tested in any reasonable capacity, because these sort of issues should not show up in shipping software. Whatever the case may be, there's really no way to get usable videos from the Venue 10 because of the freezing.

WiFi Performance

Mobile devices have definitely been the primary driver of 802.11ac adoption. Even the $199 ZenFone 2 ships with 802.11ac support, which is less money than one will pay for a good 802.11ac router. The Dell Venue 10 uses the same 1x1 802.11ac implementation as the Venue 8. With a larger chassis made of plastic I'm disappointed that Dell didn't make this a dual spatial stream implementation, but they're likely leveraging an economy of scale by sharing chipsets between both of their tablets.

With a max speed of 316Mbps over UDP, the Dell Venue 10 is right in line with the Venue 8. It's certainly not the fastest WiFi we've seen on a tablet, but it's not slow by any means, and is still a great improvement over devices that use 802.11n.