19 September 2008

The Battle of the Ages!
Samsung INNOV8 vs. Nokia N93

It is always good to review new technological advances with a new smartphone with clever optics. In the past, Nokia has been advanced in their camera technology, but as we all know Nokia has only managed to advance in small steps, of which the Nokia N95 and N82 excluding the Xenon flash is only slightly better than the 3.2MP N93 and a bit better than the 2MP Nokia N90.

It seems Nokia got sucked into the the mega pixel race, and basically stuffed in as many pixels they could without thinking of the consequence of noise and detail. Samsung now has brought out a formidable competitor in the mega pixel race.

Lets present the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 with a whooping 8megapixel resolution. The i8510 sports very similar features to the current symbian range, and it has every right to, as it is basically using the same operating system.

So we have here a powerful smart phone which too sports a descent camera optic. One has to ask, how does this fare against the classic Nokia N93 with 3.2MP and optical zoom. Thanks to Falcon01, we are able to make a fair comparison of the two.

The first comparison is outdoor good lighting,
and landscape type of shot

Samsung INNOV8 shot	Nokia N93 shot
*click to enlarge

Well it is quite clear which is the 8MP and which is 3.2MP from a blind test here. In the past when miniature sensors with high megapixels resulted in high sensor noise, which Nokia fixed by applying some crazy noise reduction that basically turned any good image into a watercolor Picasso when enlarged. We can clearly see this is not the case with the i8510. We know the N93 was one of the only model that did not apply this noise reduction, hence more detailed natural grainy images resulted.

The i8510 here is really impressive. Colours seems very natural, sensor noise seems to be controlled with next to no visible noise. N93 here is exhibiting alot of noise thanks to its minimum ISO250 as a base ISO. Alot of N93 details seems to be lost in the noise, but nothing a bit of post processing can do to clean up and reveal a bit more detail. Where the N95 and N82 only seemed to reveal slightly more detail in the past on certain shots against the N93, the i8510 has more than double the detail. Something of interest to some is the absence of sharpening halos in the i8510 image.

It looks really quite natural, Not overly sharp, but yet sharp enough to yield pleasing results definitely comparable to point and shoot digicams with similar megapixel. Just another thing to note, is the grass in this image. Both cell cams are revealing nice textured grass here. If we had an N95 or N82 to compare against, we would see green mush

Same Nokia N93 shot post process PC

*click to enlarge

Pixel peeping N93(processed and upscaled) vs i8510

*click to enlarge

Just a small addon image here. This is what I mean by cleaning up the N93 image. I applied my faithful noise reduction to the N93 image, combined with upscaling s-pline to match resolution of the i8510. We can see detail is definitely less than the i8510

Samsung INNOV8 shot	Nokia N93 shot
*click to enlarge

With this closeup of the leaves, the 8MP advantage drops off slightly, and we start to notice the i8510 noise reduction more. Even so, it is well controlled, and only slight water coloring is evident. Again we see the color profiles from both cams being nearly identical.

The N93's zoom optic having problems with corner softness but seems to capture the image at a slightly wider angle than the i8510. The i8510 has excellent corner sharpness, which is excellent! Resolution wise, the i8510 is revealing alot more resolution at the corners possible four times, and possibly double the resolution in the center of the frame.

The leaves in the shadows shows minimal advantage in any to the i8510. Interestingly the i8510 and N93 seems to have very similar dynamic range with the i8510 highlight clipping slightly more than the N93. But this could be due to the N93 exposing less than the i8510.

Samsung INNOV8 shot	Nokia N93 shot
*click to enlarge

Straight away we can see the N93 is capturing a wider angle image than the i8510. It does look like the N93 is the king of wide angle photography without aids of external lens adapters. Interestingly the grass in this shot shows alot more noise reduction shown by the smudging of the grass in the background.

On saying that the N93, also is struggling to retain detail on the grass as it approaches the background. What we must remember though, it that because the N93 has the wider angle advantage,it will also have the detail disadvantage, as everything is just that much smaller in the N93s frame. Now looking at the trees, Both cams are doing well in retaining some sort of texture.

N93 seriously is struggling here as noise density overdoes the leaf detail. The i8510 too has problems, but its noise reduction takes care of most noise, and the resolution seems to be helping to retaining much of the lea detail. I have to say the i8510 captures shadow here much better than the N93.

Samsung INNOV8 shot	Nokia N93 shot
*click to enlarge

finally we got an image comparison indoors without the aid of flash. And really, those LED flashs all pale in comparison to the xenon flash found in the Nokia N82. Ok looking closely at the images, we can see the i8510 image is slightly blurred. Possibly a bit of camera shake going on here. Also we can see the i8510 has neglected the game console unit in favour of focusing on the back wall. As well can see details there more than the console itself.

N93 with tiny center focus box has proven worthy here, and has focused spot onto the subject. Both images are exhibiting alot of noise, but the i8510 has noise reduction built in so it removes all chroma noise, leaving a bit of luma noise visible to preserver some detail, and to prevent a water colored result! Color wise the N93 is showing a dominance for red.

I have noticed this for low light shots, but this can be easily corrected later on if necessary. Even though the N93 is revealing a much sharper image, with noise than can be cleaned up later with post processing, the i8510 astonishing megapixel advantage with heavy noise reduction will reveal a slight detail advantage. This said this advantage is alot less compared to the daylight shots.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion from these images, we can see that Nokia has lot to learn from Samsung when it comes to sensor and noise reduction algorithms. As we all know the Carl Zeiss branded optics found on Nokia phones definitely can improve image quality, but only to a certain extent. Having good optics does not make up for poor sensor and noise reduction algorithms for still images.

It seems now, we can finally say the classic N93 has been fully beaten, in terms of image quality, and has been trumped in just about all aspects against the i8510. Be aware though the N93 still has one card up its sleeves. Its optical zoom and excellent formfactor. These combined allows for easier composition, combines with its exotic wide angle 28mm at the widest setting can make for wider landscapes, and artistic distortion effects.

SF Review: INNOV8 vs. N93
Originally posted: 18.09.2008
Last Updated: 19.09.2008
Author: Bigley Ling (AKA Mazor)
Copyright: Symbian Freak 2008; all rights reserved