I was interested to see Fosfor's camera phone shoot-out, featuring the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Nokia N93. They (understandably) picked the K800i as the winner, although there are a few points well worth commenting on. Read on for the link and comments....

Here's their shoot-out. In terms of stills photography, I don't doubt that the K800i currently takes the best photos, the N93 takes still photos that have outrageous levels of noise and compression artefacts. And I don't doubt that the K800i is easier to use. A far better comparison however, in terms of camera capability and form factor, would have been the K800i against the similarly-sized Nokia N73, a battle royal which I suspect the N73 would win, based on my own tests a few weeks ago.

Some notes:

• The N93's strength is in its video recording (VGA), which it's thankfully a lot better at than taking stills.
• I wonder (read: really, really hope) whether Nokia can reduce the noise and artefacts in the N93's still photos using a simple firmware update? Or is the problem in the hardware?
• The N93 is a totally different beast in terms of functionality away from the camera, with functions like advanced web browsing, messaging, TV-out and hardware-accelerated gaming. A bit of a jack-of-all-trades...

Steve