The Nokia E90 is unique at the moment in that it's the only business-focussed communicator/smartphone in the world that also has a camera capable of decent results. This is important, I feel, because despite the elegance of (for example) Nokia's separate Nseries and Eseries ranges, aimed at consumer/multimedia and enterprise respectively, there are a great many people who want the best of both worlds and, despite its well documented faults, the Nokia E90 is the best of the two devices that straddle the great divide (the HTC Kaiser tries hard but its camera isn't quite as good).
But what sort of images can the Nokia E90 take? What are its limits? What sort of quality might you hope for? In the gallery below, I hope to answer these questions. Importantly, the JPG image files linked to are the E90-shot originals, un-retouched, with all original EXIF headers intact, to prove that I haven't doctored anything.
The Nokia E90's camera isn't up to the standard of that in the Nokia N95, with 'only' 3 megapixels and no fancy Carl Zeiss optics, but it's still capable of pretty good snaps. I took the opportunity over the last few weeks to snap anything arty or interesting - enjoy. Just click on an image to download it or open it up (watch out for your browser scaling it down again...)
We were just wandering along on the way to school and my daughter found a neat frosty leaf and held it up to the sunlight. Great detail and focus from the E90's camera here, check out the frosted edges.
The wider frosty scene, pretty good handling of dark and light shades.
Later in the day, focussing on the foreground leaves to arty effect. A slight optical curvature shown in the horizon but still a good shot.
The original photo from my N95 classic article, insanely great close-up focussed detail from the E90 here.
A low light shot outside Waitrose. Zoom in and you can see the blotchy noise in areas of solid colour. Even the N95 wouldn't have done much better without flash, low light really is the enemy of phone-mounted cameras, with their tiny sensors. The new N82 would do better here, if only because the Xenon flash would light such a scene sensitively and accurately and could be used more freely.
Trying to push the boundaries again in terms of light, shooting into the sun. By upping the exposure setting a couple of notches the tree hasn't become a simple silhouette - look at the colours and details on its leaves etc.
Photographing water is always a good test of a camera. The E90 doesn't do badly here, with seamless ripples on the surface and my only complaint would be that the colours here (and in most other images on this page) aren't quite as vivid as I remember them with the naked eye.
Hopefully we'll see lots of other future smartphones with both qwerty keyboard AND quality auto-focus camera - if you're reading this, Nokia, how about an E61i replacement with similar hardware but an upgraded camera as good as that in the E90 (or better)? Here's hoping!
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian, 19 November 2007
PS. Comments welcome, as always!
