Nokia N95 - The Camera Review

[Rafe]

In part three of our series of reviews Steve looks at the camera performance and functionality of the Nokia N95. The review focuses on still image capture (we'll look at video capture later) and makes a direct comparison with a dedicated digital camera.

Read on in the full article.

[mudstuff]

Great review Steve. You have used a variety of different environments, bold colours and a motion-based image which really help to give us an idea of how it performs.

A pity about the flash as I think a lot of poeple would have utilised this on nights out or low-light situations both indoors and out. I too feel that the image processing is overdone, though it is good to hear that you can create your own profile and adjust these settings.

It's good to see a lot of flexibility and options too, more than a lot of general consumer cameras by the likes of Fuji, Sony and Canon.

I'm a semi-pro photographer in my spare time and also do a few assignments for publications at work so it will be interesting to get in to the nitty gritty of the settings and compare them to my DSLR. I wouldn't expect it to come anywhere close as it is a very unfair match but I would like to see its characteristics and personality as such and see how effective the various settings are and for what application.

I hoped that the capture time would have been improved by official launch though hopefully a firmware update is not too far away if people voice their concerns.

[tkao2025]

The images look quite nice to me and really as a phone you can't really ask for too much. It's good enough for taking along on short trips and taking a few snaps, but not good enough if you want digital camera quality. The question is will cam phones ever get to the point of being able to compete with stand along digital cameras and be able to keep in such svelt package?

You and Rafe are doing a fantastic job with these reviews. Any plans to look at e-mail and attachment capabilities, e.g. how N95 handles speadsheets and word processing docs?

It's impressive how you can write gigabytes about things that can be described in one paragraph :-) My sincere congratulations ;-) Third or fourth review of the same phone, fourth picture gallery.... you're the king :-)

[Rafe]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

You and Rafe are doing a fantastic job with these reviews. Any plans to look at e-mail and attachment capabilities, e.g. how N95 handles speadsheets and word processing docs?

We're not planning to specifically, but I think it will be mention in passing. In short it has office viewers and pdf + zip. You can upgrade to edit. The attachment support works fine.

Originally Posted by Unereddfss

It's impressive how you can write gigabytes about things that can be described in one paragraph :-) My sincere congratulations ;-) Third or fourth review of the same phone, fourth picture gallery.... you're the king :-)

Hehe. Its a fair point in some ways, that said we're trying to focus on different aspect of the N95 each time. I don't imagine everyone will use everything in their normal usage. If you're looking for a one stop look try the first impressions article or wait for the summary review.

[xerxes]

Does it really take 4 seconds to save a picture to SD?

I ask because I used a T-Mobile N95 for a few minutes on Sunday and it seemed to focus and take the pic pretty fast - certainly faster than my N73 does.

I wonder if it was set on a lower resolution than 5Mpx. I imagine that would have made it a bit faster at saving the image as the file would be smaller.

[krisse]

"A pity about the flash as I think a lot of poeple would have utilised this on nights out or low-light situations both indoors and out."

I don't think there's any cameraphones with adequate flashes out there.

The problem might well be battery life, a proper flash would tend to drain the battery a bit too quickly. Battery life is a general problem for cutting edge smartphones: gram for gram, the capacity of li-ion batteries has hardly increased at all over the past few years while the demands on batteries have grown hugely.

hi. I wonder how fast the sequence mode is. Do you know how many pictures it takes per second? (in the fastest mode) And does the speed vary with the resolution it's taken in?

Thanks!

Andy.

After reading the Nokia N95's camera review, personally, I'm satisfied about the camera quality due to the convergence of many devices (GPS, camera, phone, web browser, etc). I have to admit that in order to perfecting the picture quality is not as easy as it seems.

This is a problem from the hardware of N95 itself. Because N95's size, Nokia uses a tiny CMOS 5 mpixels sensor which is overwhelming to me. Why? Judging from my experience as a semi-pro photographer, I own a Canon DSLR 350D, which utilizes an 8 mpixels CMOS sensor (22.2 mm x 14.8 mm) which is enormously larger than the CMOS sensor in the N95. The picture quality on my DSLR is almost perfect, not comparable to N95.

I understand the limit here is utilizing a small sensor yet captures highly sensitive light particles. In order to do that, a CCD sensor is required. CCD is very small, if used in a phone it will have the capability of producing "identical" picture quality to a standalone digital camera, such as the Sony used in the review. I hope that future N-series phones will utilize CCD instead of CMOS because CCD produces images with less noise and better optical input at smaller size sensor compared to CMOS.

By utilizing CCD, there is little to no need to have an "over-processing" algorithms to sharpen, reduce noise, etc like N95 has. I think the main disadvantage is the post exposure algorithms that keeps the N95 from producing a natural images (with noises on the image, but can be reduced by reducing the image quality to 3 mpixels).

[mudstuff]

Hi Kevin7,

While a CCD sensor may perform better at the same size as a CMOS, the fundamental thing here is that a CCD uses a lot more power - a severe issue with mobile phones. Nokia and other manufacturers by in bulk for economies of scale and I dare say the CMOS sensor is factored in to many of their designs for the next year or so to come.

Therefore, while they may change to CCD and people are asking for it, it may take a while before you see them integrated into phones - and at such high resolution.

Personaly, I think they should have produced a 3mp sensor the size of this 5mp but then, as krisse said, a lot of poeple out there think higher mp is better. This is not really the case as can be seen by the decrease in speed in the consumer market for releasing larger resolution cameras.

"By utilizing CCD, there is little to no need to have an "over-processing" algorithms to sharpen, reduce noise, etc like N95 has. I think the main disadvantage is the post exposure algorithms that keeps the N95 from producing a natural images (with noises on the image, but can be reduced by reducing the image quality to 3 mpixels)."

Perhaps CCD will produce better, more natural images but that it just a guess at this stage as Nokia has not got the experience with CCD that it has with CMOS. It is also worth noting that the N95 is not producing less noise at 3mp than 5mp, it has simply resized the 5mp image and noise is therefore less visible.

Also, while I don't mean any offence, a 350D is an entry level DSLR, not a semi-pro model. While it is roughly comparable with a 10D which was a semi-pro camera a few years back, semi-pro Canon models would be the 20D, 30D and perhaps the 5D to true professionals who would use it as a back up. I have a 5D and a 20D and consider myself a semi-pro. Technically you are only considered as pro in the industry if it is your primary income and you earn more from photography than anything else. Naturally, the quality of your images are a combined factor.

[krisse]

It does seem that what's really holding back mobile technology isn't the technology itself but the power it consumes. Batteries need to get better...

I think for a tiny camera that does so much the images are quite good and I understand the problems with noise and edge enhancement post processing application.

Perhaps N95 can also be fogiven for taking 4/5 seconds between shots (although I think this could be due to some those post processing) but I can't understand this red tinted effect. It is terrible, how can they miss that !? If they tried to do a warm color effect they got it totally wrong, we are not talking about different colur composition warm, cold, netural etc. we are talking about extra red across the spectrum.

My only hope is that it might be improved with the color setting or perhaps another firmware, until then it is just embaressing... !

Fantastic review. I throughly enjoyed reading it. Indeed the N95, does need some sort of work with respect to noise reduction and sharpening. It is hard when there is so much noise and artifacts to deal with. What Nokia needs to do is indeed to improve the signal to noise on the existing sensor somehow.

Also with respect to slow shooting, to review times, this can be fixed easily by using some of the spare RAM in the N95 as temporary buffer space for photos, so that instead of waiting for writing to the MicroSD card, it can take next picture at mediately


Mazor

[chimaera]

I'd say the camera is pretty good for occaisional point and shoot use, but nothing more strenuous. In saying that its still by far and away the best camera on any phone I've ever owned