Nokia N90 camera review: Exceeding the expectations

Two types of digital zoom

The camera is equipped with a digital zoom of two modes. At the beginning of the zoom-in process, missing pixels get gradually added. If you continue to zoom in the picture, however, at a certain moment it gets cut out and gets displayed in a smaller format (central picture). Then pixels keep on being added till another cutout is done. In the end, you get a 20 times zoom and a VGA picture of very poor quality (the very right one).

Macro

As you can see from the picture with flowers, Nokia focuses on the center of the scanned scene, while Canon chose to focus on the closest flower. The rest of the pictures show that N90 is very good at taking pictures from a closer distance.

Color effects

For the creative photographers...

Exposure compensation

Even though we already wrote about the exposure compensation several times, I would like to mention it here once again, with the help of the following pictures. The first photo was taken in automatic mode, in the second one I took off a grade, and in the third photo two grades were taken off. As visible, the sky is no more that bright and at the same time, the trees are reasonably dark - just like they should be. In the last picture I made the contrary step - I added a degree, just for the comparison.

Test patterns and text

Although the test pattern shows a significant degree of softness, lines are clear enough. As for the text shots, Nokia took them really well.

White color balance

The following pictures were taken under bulb light. In the first one, the white balance is automatic; in the second one we used the bulb light mode of the white balance; in the third picture the sunny day mode was applied.

Flash in action

The diode flash proved to be quite efficient. The first picture below was taken without a flash and as you can see, it is really dark. The second picture was taken from a distance of about 1 meter and on the third the distance between the little bear and the mobile camera is about 2 meters.

Carl Zeiss did not fail

In the description of the camera of Nokia N90 in my review of the phone I put a certain dose of careful criticism (perhaps, you remember the paragraph entitled as "Did Carl Zeiss fail?"). As if I knew, that something was wrong. But as you can see today, Nokia N90 belongs to the absolute top 10 chart of all photo mobiles. At present, N90's only and most dangerous competitor is Sony Ericsson K750/W800. Which one is better? The answer will be here soon...