Nokia Lumia 1320 review: Playing by the book

5MP camera is alright

The Nokia Lumia 1320 boasts a 5 MP camera, which is capable of taking pictures of up to 2592x1936 pixel resolution.

The camera UI is pretty simple - you have your viewfinder and a couple of controls on the right. Those are the still/video camera toggle and the Lens button. On the left you have an arrow that takes you to the images taken with the camera, alternatively you can do a swipe gesture too.

Camera UI

The camera app on Windows Phone offers extensive settings, ranging from scenes and effects to white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpness and ISO among others. You have a dedicated Macro focus mode but no face detection.

Holding the shutter key will wake the phone up with and launch the camera app. The Lumia 1320 is not the fastest shooter around and it takes it a couple of seconds before a photo is taken. This is a longer delay than what we're used to from current smartphones.

Lenses are an interesting take at feature add-ons, enhancing the camera functionality without making a mess of third party apps each with its own UI. Lenses are accessible directly from the native camera app (they show up in the list of installed apps too if you want to pin a Lens to the start screen).

Lenses

Nokia has preloaded the Glam Me lens used for beautifying shots, plus the Panorama and Cinemagraph lenses.

Cinemagraph creates photos that are mostly static, but a part of them is animated. You have to hold the phone steady while shooting. When you're done, the Lens will offer two (sometimes three) areas that can be animated and when you pick an area, you can tweak the animation, trim it, and set the loop pattern.

Given its modest specs, the Nokia Lumia 1320 fares as well as you could expect in terms of image quality. The level of detail is among the best for the 5 MP league and even if that's not the most prestigious league to be competing in, the Lumia 1320 will do for more casual shots. Contrast is good too, although white balance is a hit and miss affair with colors getting a somewhat unpleasant bluish tint on many occasions. Noise is kept well under control.

Nokia Lumia 1320 camera samples

Photo quality comparison

Nokia Lumia 1320 in our photo quality comparison tool

Camcorder captures 1080p@30fps

The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera's and has plenty of features too. You can change the white balance and turn the continuous auto-focus on or off. You can use the LED flash as video light.

Camcorder interface

The Nokia Lumia 1320 captures 1080p videos, which are quite smooth and pack lots of detail. The continuous auto-focus sometimes is too sensitive though, but it's nice there is an option to turn it off. Unfortunately, there is no touch focus option, you have to rely on the auto-focus for the video, and it sometimes fails when shooting close objects such as our Ferris Wheel for the video comparison tool.

Colors are accurate and contrast is good too, but the dynamic range isn't as spot on as we'd hoped for.

Bitrate is reasonable at 20 Mpbs and the framerate is steady at 30 fps. The 1320 captures only mono sound at 96 Kbps bitrate and 44 kHz sampling rate.

Here's a 1080p video sample we've uploaded to YouTube.

And here is one untouched 1080p video for downloading.

Video quality comparison

The Nokia Lumia 1320 is ready to stand up against the fierce competition in our video comparison tool. Its page will give you information on what to look for.

Nokia Lumia 1320 in our video quality comparison tool