April 14, 2006
A picture is worth a ... thousand dollars
Disclosure: I’ve done consulting work for Nokia, and am guilty of conspiring to pimp Nokia phones to bloggers. You’ve been warned!
You might have picked up that Nokia are slipping nice phones into the hands of various bloggerati courtesy of Andy’s carefully-crafted PR2.0 efforts. But I got a free N90 some time earlier as a thanks for some good advice I gave them last year. So nah, nah sucks! ;) Anyhow, I’ve got a commercial interest. Thankfully.
All the pics here are taken with the N90, apart from the picture of the phone itself. No retouching of any kind has been applied. Click on them for the full-size originals, although bear in mind that bandwidth does cost me money.
The 3700 year old stone Machrie Moor stone circle, Arran, Scotland, 1 January 2006.
This isn’t a review of the N90, but more an account of my experiences of living with the device in my pocket for 6 months. In a nutshell, the N90 is a standard Symbian series 60 smartphone with an enhanced main screen, quality optical unit with 2 megapixel camera on a twist cap, and a swivel and twist cover and external second colour screen. There are plenty of real N90 reviews out there that recap the functionality. I haven’t read a single one. Nor have I bothered to read the manual. These are just my thoughts from being a casual user.
Firstly, understand that this is a camera with a smartphone dangling underneath, not the other way round. In fact, the “smartphone” bit suffers from all the usual issues of smartphones (non-standard UIs, different screen sizes, incompatible software, awkward activation and anti-piracy schemes, lack of memory, users simply don’t care, blah blah) that have kept the market small. I don’t really use any of the smartphone features, except to play Frozen Bubble whilst waiting to collect take-out food from the local Thai restaurant. But then I don’t have a TV, and the radio’s resting for a year or three. So we’re not normal here at Geddes central.
I enjoy photography, without being a fetishist about it. Calling it a hobby would be too grand. So this phone has been of quite a lot of interest. Quite possibly you’ll have seen on old blog posts some of the outputs from the crapcams on the other phones knocking around the house — a Motorola V525 (nice phone but mediocre pictures, way too fuzzy at the corners) and Sony Ericsson T630 (appalling camera, great UI). The difference is enormous — it’s almost unfair to talk of them both in the same category.
Welcome to Edinburgh — all walking distance from my home.
The general quality of the camera is pretty good. It’s not up to the standard of a dedicated digicam, but it’s not totally outclassed either. That said, if someone could sprinkle a bit of Canon’s magic pixel dust on the successors to the N90, it would be welcome. Yes, it struggles with high contrast, has barrell distortion, chromatic aberrations, noise, and shutter lag. But you won’t care, trust me. It’s exceeds your expectations too often.
Two megapixels is a great size. They’re big enough to fill all but the biggest PC screens, and make great 6×4 printouts. My mum has a Sony DSC-U20 camera, a wee jewel that Sony has discontinued. (The successor was camera selection of the year by Good Experience guru Mark Hurst last year.) Again, 2MP, and great photos in a tiny, cheap, convenient package. Why pay for more?
The performance in low light is quite commendable. The LED flash is certainly no embarassment, as you can see from one of my earlier posts of the railway staircase. It tends to over-expose when close up, though.
There are a few big lessons I’ve drawn from this device.
It’s a business device masquerading as a consumer phone
At client workshops and with colleagues, I always end the day by snapping all the flip charts and whiteboards. The resolution is just right for this, and with a modicum of care with lighting and keeping still even my scrawl is legible. Plus, carrying a camera around is a great means of capturing events and situations that are so much better communicated in pictures than words. Death to the 7-bullet Powerpoint! Stick up your own pictures that show ‘em directly.
Full explanation of this chart available for modest consulting fee.
It’s not just that you carry it with you outside…
Everyone knows the received wisdom that compensating benefit of camerphones is you always have them with you and charged up. But the unexpected finding for me is that many of my best candid pictures are inside my home. When my elder daughter was splayed out climbing on the edges of the hot bath with a great big ‘look at me’ grin, I’m definitely not leaving the room to go hunting for the digicam and seeing if the battery is charged. Whilst mobile telephony is all about “third places”, I suspect mobile photography is more mundane home-based, particularly for those with children. I find that the “whip it out of your pocket” nature of a camera phone is very different from the reverance afforded to a dedicated camera it its own little pouch. I’ve taken far more spur-of-the-moment records of the kids than ever before.
Laima and Daina, my two daughters.
Video killed the photo star
The N90 does a great job with video. It seems to cope with lighting problems better than with photos, the audio comes through clear, the form factor is just great (particularly that you can swivel the top for a photo, and then open it up for a video). I think the best memories of my small monsters will be the videos. (I’m saving them up on gold CDs to use as blackmail tools for misbehaving teens in a decade or so. Clean your room, girl, or your baby vids go on Flickr and I’ll tell your friends!)
Pixels matter
I used to cringe when taking photos with the other phonecams, and groan at seeing the results on a PC screen. Although you’ll get your share of duds with the N90, there will also be plenty of great shots that you’ll be proud of. But the good thing about lots of pixels is you can throw ‘em away. Crop, downsize, and you’ve got something usable. I don’t think I’d buy the N90 for my personal use (it’s overkill for someone who works from home and goes out with family, and doesn’t give his mobile number to many people), but a good quality camera is now near the top of the list of necessary features. In fact, I wish Nokia would stick out a phone that just does great pictures, voice and SMS. I’m sure there’s a market.
Christmas fair, with Scott Monument in the background.
Ants are your new photographic friends (almost)
The absolute highlight of the camera is its macro performance which is quite exceptional. Furthermore, it’s all automatic, with no macro mode to faff around with:
Taken at Butterfly World, Edinburgh, Scotland. March 2006.
Size isn’t everything
I don’t find the weight of the phone or its size an issue. Indeed, compare it to my first cellphone, a Motorola mr601.
1997 vs. 2006: La plus ca change…
Apparently my old Moto was quite a cool phone at the time, for those without a Startac budget.
It’s not perfect, but that’s life
There are some annoyances to the N90. The biggest, to me, is the ridiculously loud branded jingle noise it plays when you turn it on. Sometimes it randomly doesn’t store a shot (you can generally tell), or there’s a strange 3-way lag between pressing the shutter button, the shutter noise, and the actual picture being taken (by which time you’ve moved the camera and get a blur). The image transfer is a bit autistic — I always go through the same old sequence of marking all pictures, sending via Bluetooth and deleting. There’s no vibrate function, which is a problem if I’m walking about with headphones on. The battery life is OK, but nothing to shout about. The lens cover could do with being easily snapped-out and replaceable. You can’t fix the exposure by half-pressing the shutter. Niggly stuff.
Bottom line
It’s mine. I like it. I’m keepng it.
No, you can’t have it. Go get your own.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 03:23 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Whiteboard photos work great -- a few years ago, when cameras made the leap to 2 megapixels (experimentally that is about the lower limit for doing a good whiteboard) we started using them. Someone would take notes on a laptop and images from significant white board events during the talk would be shuffled in. We also took a photo of everyone in the meeting.
It is remarkable that I can go back to meetings in 2001 and still recall quite a bit with all of the clues. I can't say the same for text only meetings.
I did make a version with a simple text editor that time stamped every line. With a time synched camera, the images just pop into the right place.
Posted by: at April 17, 2006 04:17 AMWhiteboard photos from 1 megapixel+ cameras are great, but to achieve consistently high quality results, you may need to edit the photos.
My company, scanR, turns jpeg photos of whiteboards into clean, crisp images embedded in PDF files for easy sharing and printing. Here is a thumbnail of your whiteboard image after processing with scanR: http://blog.scanr.com/scanr_blog/2006/04/whiteboard_exam.html
If you don't want to use scanR, here are some instructions on how to do this with Photoshop: http://wiki.ehow.com/Copy-a-Whiteboard-With-Your-Digital-Camera-or-Camera-Phone.
Posted by: at April 17, 2006 06:23 PMI was ready to run out to Poundstretcher to get one and then I got to the bit about no vibrate function. (and if Andy Abramson is reading this - how come?)
It's not a fetish or anything (even though I am sitting on the washing machine right now) but I prefer to have a phone that vibrates. Unless you can invent one which taps me on the shoulder.
Great shot of Arran by the way. If you are heading that way again, drop me an email and come in for blogger coffee time on the way.
Came across your blog for your N90 (great pics by the way!) while looking for some camera phone blogs. I recently got the Nokia 6280 and was truly impressed with its 2 MP camera as well, in fact so impressed I started a blog to keep a record of some of the better shots.
By the way I think you have a good point about a basic phone with a decent camera, I mean, that' s all I really use too.
Neil,
The reason for no vibrate function is two fold.
1) weight/size--there is only so much you can tuck into the phone body without sacrificing something.
2) Vibration with a video camera? Some thoughts go to the point of the user not being keen enough to turn off the vibrator and just at the moment of that great shot a call from mom comes in...ruining that special shot/moment. Not sure if that was planned or not, but in my mind a vibrator and a video cam are not synonymous.
Posted by: at June 12, 2006 02:00 PMI've had my N90 for almost a year and love it to bits but not having vibrate is the biggest pain.
Sure you don't want it to vibrate when you're taking a movie and it's easy enough to make that a setting. At the moment Nokia phones won't vibrate if an SMS comes in and you're talking on it.
Weight wise I don't think it's much of an issue, they type of people who buy this sort of phone wouldn't find it a problem, especially given it's features.
Good text! but why dont give some hints about "how to get decent pocture" from such phone?
Thanks