Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review - Part
4
25th January 2009
Camera
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic has a 3.2
megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and dual LED
flash. We found the picture quality to be adequate but
not particularly good. Some noise is visible in stills
photographs, and video recording is a little grainy.
Unlike some other recent phones, the
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic does not geotag photographs with
the GPS coordinates. It is possible that this might
be included in a future software update.
The test photographs here were taken
around Elstow Abbey, Bedfordshire in January 2009.
For this comparison, we took the
5800 and compared it with a Nokia E90
(which also has a 3.2 megapixel camera,
but no Carl Zeiss lens), a Kodak DX6490
(a standalone 4 megapixel digital camera),
and the Hitachi DZ-HV564E which is a
5 megapixel video camera.
In this scene, all the test pictures
we made with the 5800 had a colour cast.
Although this is easily removable in
software, the overall colours did not
seem to be as good as on the other three
cameras.. although at one of the test
photos on the E90 also had a colour
cast.
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Nokia
5800 XpressMusic
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Nokia
E90
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Kodak
DX6490
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Hitachi
DZ-HV564E
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Nokia
5800 XpressMusic
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Nokia
E90
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A detailed look at the photographs
shows that the 5800 is good, but the
DX6490 is much sharper, even though
the megapixel count isn't as high.
The Hitachi has the highest pixel
count of all devices, but the photograph
is poorly defined.
Lens quality counts for a lot, and
the dedicated digital camera clearly
has a better lens. Although the Hitachi
has the highest megapixel count, it
probably has the poorest quality picture.
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Kodak
DX6490
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Hitachi
DZ-HV564E
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Some sample shots show the capabilities
of the 5800. Click the picture for the original. The
camera suffers from some visible noise in darker areas
and has some difficulties keeping the edges of the picture
sharp.
Close-up
shots are sharp with good detail. Some
noise is evident in darker areas.
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The
camera copes well with this gloomy interior
shot. Again, noise is present in darker
areas.
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The
dual LED flash illuminates quite brightly
at a short distance. Not a great shot,
but it was very dark.
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This
window is taken at maximum digital zoom,
so it looks quite blurry.
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A
difficult shot, but the 5800's flash
is not bright enough to compensate for
very bad lighting.
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This
outdoor shot is OK, but the bottom left
hand corner shows poor sharpness.
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This
outdoors shot should be better, but
noise is clearly present with poor sharpness
on details.
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The
camera copes quite well despite having
the sun in shot. Noise is visible in
the dark areas.
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Video capture is not as good as we were
hoping - the following screenshot "high quality"
widescreen at 640 x 352 pixels. The quality is adequate
for playback on the phone itself, but overall quality
is grainy. Recent Nokia handsets have done well on video
recording quality, and this is still better than most
rival devices.
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