Nokia 6630 review: Focus on camera

Nokia is going to launch its best camera mobile phone, the megapixel 6630 model. It is a Symbian Series 60 smartphone and it's functionality is not much different than Nokia 7610 for example. Now we are bringing you a review dedicated to the integrated camera only.

The camera of the new Nokia 6630 phone is really very good. Its quality can't be compared to the VGA gadgets and is also better than the cameras of the Nokia 7610 and 6670 camera phones, which were the best Nokia camera phones till now. The Sony Ericsson S700i phone is the undoubtful leader.

Massive frame of the digital camera lens system • The covering slide is attached to the lens

The higher resolution is not the only feature, which makes Nokia 6630 different from the previous Nokia phones. The camera is responding fast. If you turn off the image preview, you will be able to shoot with a minimal delay - the lag between two pictures is approximately a second. Nokia offers also a possibility of sequential shooting with shorter intervals.

The lens frame can be detached - Nokia will probably offer addon lenses and filters in the future

How does is shoot?

Before describing all features and settings possibilities, let me tell you about the way Nokia 6630 is shooting. Keeping in mind that it's a mobile camera phone, the pictures are really of an above-average quality - sharp and relatively not distorted. However compared to a usual digital camera the phone loses by far.

Pictures in different light conditions and settings (full resolution)

Let's stay with the camera phone. Pictures do not look like they were taken over a beer bottle. In the borders they are not fuzzier than in the middle. In some cases the picture has dark corners: strong vignetting. Colors when shooting in good light conditions are relatively authentic. The phone does not offer a possibility of setting white color balance. Therefore if the automatic color balance doesn't handle the artificial light properly we are out of luck.

The following sample pictures are in full resolution, without edits. Further demonstrative pictures will be smaller.

Sample pictures in full resolution

Nokia 6630 is the producer's first camera phone which saves the EXIF information in the JPEG file headers.

Resolution: megapixel… and a bit more

Previous Nokia models 7610 and 6670 offered "only" a megapixel resolution. The new 6630 camera phone is equipped with 1.33 MP sensor. The effective picture resolution is a bit lower - 1.23 MP, the highest picture format is 1280 x 960 pixels. There is only one lower resolution available: 640 x 480 pixels. Picture quality can be selected in three levels. However, there is not a big visible difference between the highest and the lowest picture quality. Only if you enlarge a picture on a PC, you'll be able to notice the stronger JPEG compression.

Menu environment during shooting • context menu • settings

The size of picture files depends on the selected quality level. While the average size of high quality images is 500 kB, lower quality pictures can be half the size, which means that users can spare a lot of memory space by selecting the suitable quality.

Resolution 1 280 x 960 pixels, from the highest quality to the lowest

Resolution 640 x 480 pixels, from the highest to the lowest quality