Siemens S65 vs. Nokia 7610: Comparing the megapixels

We compared photos made by two of the first megapixel camera phones. Have a look how Siemens S65 and Nokia 7610 managed taking the same scenes. Note the exposure, noise and color balance; the resolution is not everything.

A mobile phone with a megapixel camera has still the taste of something new and progressive. Besides Nokia 7610, which is already available on the market, a new Siemens S65 will come up soon. If we want to pick up it's primacy in some way, it's the first ordinary mobile with a megapixel camera - Nokia 7610 is a smartphone with Symbian OS.

We took the same scenes with both phones, so you can compare the photo quality. Pictures are in full resolution, therefore they are a bit bigger than usual. Get ready for files size of several hundred kilobytes. Of course we didn't change anything, you'll see them as they came out from the camera.

Resolution is not everything

Straight to the point - Nokia 7610 pictures are evidently better. At a piece that we used for this purpose the pictures are visibly fuzzy in the upper part, but in general the photos are sharp enough, with good color balance.

Siemens S65 photos are bigger than the ones from Nokia 7610. Their format is 1280 x 960 pixels while Finnish rival features only 1152 x 864 pixels - so keep in mind that we are comparing a 1.3 MP camera to a 1 MP camera. Fuzziness is the same all over the pictures, but we can also see a little vignetting, more visible at the thumbnails. When you see the pictures in full resolution you will notice a lot of overexposed areas. We were disappointed mostly from the overall dullness of the pictures. It seems like Siemens is short of colors (they are not vibrant enough) and camera creates almost a rain atmosphere on a sunny day. And that's not all: pictures have very high contrast - underexposed and overexposed areas at the same time - no matter how you adjust the levels in a graphic editor, it's always wrong.

Against Nokia 7610 Siemens S65 offers more advanced camera settings. At Nokia 7610 you can only select a size of pictures and digital zoom. Siemens uses only crops from the big picture instead of a digital zoom, but it features very useful possibility of exposure compensation. Menu offers also a self timer, three settings for the white color balance and several effects.

The pictures

Nokia 7610 photos are on the left side, Siemens S65 photos - on the right side. Once again, please note the bigger size of the files, we published the originals to give you the best possible way to compare the photos.

Resolution chart

Photos in the dusk

No two megapixels are the same

Nokia 7610 pictures won't surprise us, as we already know them. They're not excellent but the megapixel resolution brings something more against ordinary camera phones. Siemens S65 produces pictures with higher resolution, but the resolution is not everything, the quality of integrated digital camera is only average.