Nokia X6 review: Going up the ladder

The camera has its ups and downs

Nokia X6 has a 5 MP camera with a maximum image resolution of 2592x1944 pixels. Carl Zeiss optics promise nice photos with a lot of detail.

The camera UI is similar to the one found in 5800 XpressMusic and a carbon copy of the one in N97 and N97 mini - the few changes made are not really for the better.

All the settings are squeezed in a common menu, except for the flash, which has its own dedicated shortcut. We understand that a tabular layout isn't the easiest of things on this kind of device but some of the more important features could have had their own shortcuts too.

The camera UI

At least the range of settings that the Nokia X6 offers is extensive enough: from manual white balance and ISO to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast. Various effects are also at hand, labeled as Color Tones.

The geo-tagging option is available out of the box.

Nokia X6 lacks all the modern features that the other competing manufacturers are using such as face detection, smile detection and even blink prevention.

The viewfinder on the Nokia X6 doesn't occupy the whole screen - a bar on the right is reserved for the touch controls. You have a settings button that launches a semi-transparent overlay of all available shooting options, a dedicated Flash button, an on-screen shutter key and finally, the Options menu key.

The on-screen shutter key seems absolutely redundant - it doesn't have a half press/full press action to properly handle auto focus. It would've been way better to have a Quick Settings button instead.

Image quality

The picture quality is pretty decent by our books. First of all the picture detail is enough to qualify the photos as very nice. The next thing is that the noise reduction algorithm is mature enough and finds a good balance between noise levels and detail. There is no purple fringing and the white balance and auto ISO settings worked just fine. Photos have good contrast and accurate colors.

The typical-for-Nokia slight yellowish tint is present in the Nokia X6 camera too, but it's not too obtrusive and most consumers prefer photos with warmer colors.

And there go some photo samples from the X6 camera.

Nokia X6 camera samples

Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the Nokia X6. You can check out what that test is all about here.

Nokia X6 resolution chart photo • 100% crops

Nokia N97 mini resolution chart photo • 100% crops

Video recording

The camcorder interface doesn't differ from the still camera much. The camera can capture video in either VGA or the screen resolution (640 x 352 px) resolution, in both cases at 30 frames per second.

The camcorder UI

The X6 video capture quality is OK. Colors and white balance turn out just fine, but the compression seems too aggressive in most of the clips and produces noticeable video artifacts. Anyway, VGA@30fps seems to be the best that Nokia can offer right now.

Here are two samples from the Nokia X6:

Sample 1, VGA@30fps
Sample 2, 640x352@30fps