Three Days with a Phone

One of the more surprising features of the Nokia E90 is its camera. Since I’m traveling quite a lot, I wanted to see whether I can use the E90’s camera as a point-and-shoot camera. Not that I expect it to replace my good-old Canon 20D + 24-70L2.8 lens, but….How does Nokia’s E90 camera perform for occasional photos? With this question in mind, I went to take few pictures and test the results which are presented here.

Test 1: Landscape Photography

First I wanted to how the camera performs when taking pictures of a still landscape scenary.

This is my first try with the camera. All the settings are default.

I noticed that metering is not very accurate and the white areas are over exposed, so I changed the exposure compensation to -1 (EV -1):  

I think that the end result is nice. Good color balance, reasonable exposure and good white balance.  Some post processing with Photoshop to correct the levels can lighten the dark areas and produce a more balanced picture.

One annoying thing about the settings is that the camera/phone does not keep the settings. Every time I change the shooting mode all the settings are reverted to their default. As a result I needed to change the exposure compensation every time I changed the shooting mode…weird.

Test 2: Close up Mode

Now, I wanted to check how the E90 produces close-up pictures.

First picture of a flower in my back yard was taken with Scene Mode set to Close-up Mode and the rest were set to Auto mode (the default settings):

As previously, the light yellow part of the flower got a bit over exposed. In the following picture I changed the exposure compensation to -1 (EV -1) and got a much better result:

These are couple of center crops from additional close-up pictures I took with the E90:

Now, the same picture with some Photoshop modifications:

Conclusions

I have to admit that the E90’s camera produces nicer pictures than I expected. There are some problems with over sharpening, narrow dynamic range and inaccurate exposure and metering. However, if one is aware of these limitations the E90 provides some manual ways to improve the results. It is all about knowing the limitations of the E90’s camera.

An important note about Sharpening. I found that most of the images taken with the E90 are over sharpened and since the sharpening algorithm is less than perfect the camera produces  substantial noise around the edges of the items in the photos. I managed to get much better results when setting the sharpening to “smooth” and applying Unsharp Mask in photoshop. 

Exposure, Lighting and Metering

This is the biggest tip of them all - change the exposure compensation to -1. The result will be much better (IMHO) and with much less over exposed parts. This is mainly due to the narrow dynamic range of the E90’s sensor. Level correction can be done easily with Photoshop to lighten the darker parts, but once a pixel if over exposed and burnt there is no way to revive it.

A small example is provided below:

This is a snap shot I took at the beach. All settings are set to Auto, exposure compensation is set to -1 (EV -1) to reduce the chance for over exposed parts. This is especially important when you have dark parts (in this case most of the picture) and bright parts (the sunset).

Now, some post processing in photoshop to correct colors, lighten the dark parts and add some red color to the sunset in the sky produce the following:

Here you can see much more details in the dark parts of the picutre, the color balance is more acurate and the overall result is nicer (IMHO, at least).

Shutter Lag

This was also a nice surprise, the overall shutter lag was not too bad. Yes, it is still long - but it is well within an acceptable range for daily usage.

Overall Image Quality

I have to say that the overall picture quality is much nicer than I expected from a phone that Photos are not its primary feature (like the N95, for example). The colors are nice, the details are good for a 3.2M pixel camera phone, and once you get to know your and the E90’s limitations you can produce nice pictures.

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