23 April 2007
It's not necessary 2B perfect 2B famous!
CAMERA PART I
 Probably the first thing that you will notice about the N95 is the fact that the Nokia N95 is the first Nokia phone which gives resolution up to 5.0 mega pixels (2592 x 1944 pixels) and I am pretty sure that most of you will be impressed about that number, but... If you know a little bit more about photography you should know that amount of pixels is just one, in fact not a very important number on the specification paper.
The megapixel race on digital cameras of the last years seems to get settled down now but in the mobile phone world it seems that there is a completely different trend.
Mobile phone manufactures pump megapixels while the optics and sensor size basically remain the same. Therefore, this trend has a terrible effect on photo quality in my personal opinion. Oldie Nokia N90 with its 2 MPX sensor beats all these megapixels beasts in some situations.
OK, I accept that maybe you do not quite agree with me about the Nokia N90, but you have to admit that cramming more pixels on small CMOS sensors like it is practiced on our lovely phones nowadays, only dramatically increases the noise. Anyway, companies seem to have decided that selling phones with less than 3.2 mpx is too tough a job.
They know that most of the phone users care only about the number of megapixels and the idea is that more megapixels usually mean better sale results. I still think that it is not excuse and that they should start working on quality and stop boosting pixels just like that!! Sure, a 5mpx sensor and this huge number of pixels have some advantage and on most images it is obvious that N95's 5mpx sensor resolves more details overall and this is noticeable especially in darker areas, shadows actually.
Last but not the less important, I know that you are already sick of my rhetoric so I will stop at this point and leave to my friend Mazor for a better in-depth camera quality overview. He is expert after all while I am still learning and I also want to offer you another, professional opinion.
In short, I have had some nice phones for a comparison camera test, Nokia N90, N93, N73 N95 vs. mighty Canon S3-IS. I took a lot of photos and chose some good samples for the huge camera test on the page XI.
As I am not going to discuss the quality of the taken photos in details I’ll concentrate on the camera soft, some interesting hardware solutions and share my thoughts about camera part over all.
Working with this phone in camera mode is very close to working with the classic point and shoot digital cameras, camera soft works in landscape mode, there is a dominating huge screen on the left side supported with d-pad and controlling keys on the right side, zoom control is located on the top left side and finally two-point camera trigger on the top right corner is the typical layout that we can find on most cameras today.
People, good or extremly good lighting conditions
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Carl Zeiss Vario Tessar lens is located on the back side of course, surrounded with a robust metal-like ring frame marked with the ZEISS sign. Lens is protected by mechanical mechanism that is easy to use and that also has function to run/close camera soft.
Same as on N73, the side control keys are chromed and illuminated in splendid blue light that comes in quite cool glowing effect. It starts with shining from the zooming key followed by the gallery button and ends on the camera trigger. Deactivation of side keys goes in different direction. Effect is nice but unfortunately the illumination of these keys isn’t affected by light sensor and keys are illuminated even on the direct sun light which is completely useless and has only effect on battery life.
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Also, speaking of the side keys, I would like to see some more functionality. For example, camera trigger is completely useless in idle mode and it would be nice to add torch feature to this button. N93 has this feature and it is really handy and I don’t see reason why not to enable the same thing with N95!? Why not get more functionality from this button and built-in led flash? Another thing related to the camera trigger is that it remains active even while the camera is off and call is active and accidental press on the key cause confusing background beep sound and therefore it should be locked while the call is active.
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The main camera screen is very well arranged and easy to use. In the upper left corner is the symbol that shows currently active mode. Left bottom corner contains information about number of the images or the time left for video recording space based on the currently selected resolution and projected size of the photos/videos. The right side is reserved for the soft keys; in the top corner is exit while bottom corner is reserved for the basic setup.
Anyway, all important functions are controlled over the icons on the right side of the display just like on my Canon digital cam. Working with this icon based menu is very easy and intuitive. If you hold cursor on some icon for some time it will show explanation of feature which can be useful for users that are confused with icons. Of course, this icon menu disappears once when the phone starts with focusing and it is replaced with different icon set when the phone shows the preview of the taken photo.
Also, when you try to zoom scene this menu will be replaced with the zoom bar. Phone unfortunately lacks optical and only offers digital zoom up to 20x while the zoom on the higher levels works with cuts and after all I highly suggest you to avoid using this zoom very often. It’s only useful to impress your friends that haven’t deep photography knowledge. In my personal opinion digital zoom only benefits the manufacturer, because it’s another big number to stick on a spec sheet and another nasty trick how to attract more customers and convince them to think they did a great deal because they have a cam with 20x digital zoom.
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Digital zoom of X3 approximately, crop 1:1, looks terrible isn’t it?
Will not post sample but try to imagine how it looks like at X20? |
Digital zoom is a little more difficult to explain than optical zoom but I’ll try to give my best. You see, digital zoom is not really zoom, in the strictest definition of zoom term. Digital zoom actually digitally enlarges photos by adding missing pixels via the interpolation, it enlarges a part of the image and on that way simulates optical zoom. In other words, the camera crops a portion of the image and then enlarges it back to size and the result is blurry picture with less details and pretty bad quality. If you've been regularly using digital zoom and wondered why your pictures don’t look so great, you know now.
CAMERA SOFTWARE VIDEO |
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*click to watch it |
So, once again, do not use digital zoom at all, PhotoShop definitely has better algorithms than your phone and if you really need to zoom something take regular photo and then enlarge it and crop in PS. Believe me that cropping and enlarging can be done easily in some raster graphic editing soft, such as Photoshop with much better final result and more control over the whole enlarging procedure.
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The software offers all necessary controls over the hardware that you could expect or that you’ll need in working with this cam. It has some options like sharpness settings that can’t be found as standard feature on classic digital cameras. Beside the automatic mode, phone offers 5 different predefined modes (close-up, sport, landscape, night, night portrait) and one user defined scene mode. Flash is also controlled over the soft and it offers red eye reduction mode although it doesn’t work very well. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer control over the intensity which I would like to see and which can be useful in taking short distance photos.
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Furthermore it has self timer mode, sequence mode, exposure compensation (+2 ~ -2EV at 0.5 step), white balance (automatic, sunny, cloudy, incandescent, fluorescent), Color tone, Contrast and sharpness settings and finally ISO settings that offers automatic mode, low, medium or high ISO settings. Lot of useful options for photo enthusiast but I still miss one thing, it’s the control over the noise reduction, with such an aggressive noise algorithm it’s a must have feature.
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Speaking of the flash, unfortunately, Nokia is still forcing led solution while the other manufactures have models with xenon flashes. The led flash build in N95 is strong, much stronger than the flash on N93 or N90 and a little bit stronger than flash that can be found on N73 but it is still far behind the xenon flashes and in most situation it provides insufficient light that will leave you in dark.
Xenon Flash modules would be a welcome addition and should provide a real boost to mobile photography. Why settle for an inferior LED illumination source in mobile phone cameras?
Please Nokia produce a phone with flash that can take clear pictures in low light or backlight conditions, such as in restaurants, bars, clubs or other places where people socialize and where we want to use our lovely camera phones on proper way, just like the standard point and shoot cameras.
Sure, xenon flash has some downsides, it requires bulky electrolytic storage capacitor required for xenon flash units, it could take a long time to recharge between flashes, it drains battery fast and last but not the least it cannot be used for the video recording. Therefore Nokia should keep led flash for the video recording, for enlightening the object while focusing in the lower lighting conditions or for the torch purpose and add a xenon flash for still imaging.
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Soft itself is more stable and definitely faster in comparison to the proto model that I have tested some time ago, but unfortunately time between two shots is still too long in my personal opinion and this is the point where N95 cant be compared to the classic digital cam, speed of the cam and soft is far away from the classic point and shoot digital camera and I guess it has something with already mentioned RAM problem. After the pressing on the trigger button phone needs more than 5 seconds to process photo and show preview. Whole process together with focusing sometimes takes even more than 10 seconds which is really slow and unacceptable. If you really need to take some fast shots its suggestible to activate sport or burst mode and disable preview.
Landscape
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However, focus is pretty fast and it works very well, much better than autofocus on N93 that fails very often, actually it is comparable to N73 in terms of usability and speed. Just like with N90 or N73 and unlike on N93(i), autofocus is also available in close-up mode which is very handy and welcome feature although in some specific situation it requires a lot of patient and numerous attempts to get the right focus on right point of the subject.
In lower lighting conditions, focus is supported with the led flash and object is enlighten during the focusing process same as on N73 but this feature on N95 is extremely buggy, sometime it works just fine but sometimes it doesn’t provide any light in exactly the same conditions, quite confusing situation. I hope this is only a firmware issue as I didn’t have such problems with proto device that I’ve had on test.
Indoors
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The very well known Mars effect, annoying red tone from the proto photos is unfortunately still here. It seems that Nokia had worked on this problem, effort on slowing this issue is visible but… On some photos the red tone is still noticeable, especially on landscape photos, although it is not as intensive as before. Again, improvement is more than noticeable; situation with white balance is acceptable but still not ideal, very variable depending on the shooting modes and conditions.
.:[ Nokia N95 - Technical Specifications ]:.
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