Nokia N95 and camera phones in general, any pointers?

[Stu R]

Appreciate any help that can be offered with this one, as it's slowly destroying my will to keep an otherwise marvellous phone. It's a long one, but I feel the need to explain...

So, I've had a chance to use my camera some more on my N95, intial pictures looked reasonably promising, but overall, for anything other than close ups or very distant scenery shots it seems average at best. Classic example being my attempts at photographing my car. Impossible task for the N95 it seems regardless of the brackets being green.

I moved to this phone from a sony ericsson K800i, and despite the adverts and famous lenses etc, as well as being 5mp as opposed to 3.2 on my Sony Ericsson (I know this doesn't have any bearing on the image quality), I'm really unimpressed having spent the last week trying to get some decent pictures of my car, so far the Sony has it beaten hands down for quality of pictures, which I'm sure shouldn't be the case.

Now I know these phones are never going to generate top of the range SLR quality pics, but for a camera which markets it's apparantly fabulous camera as a key component, I'm left a little, no, very underwhelmed.

A couple of examples below.

This picture was taken with my Sony Ericsson, nothing extraordinary.


Same car, same time of day, similar weather conditions, not quite as intense sun hence the lack of colour in the paint, and the nokia gives me this...



I've tried every setting, every scene mode, used my own settings in every possible combination, and it's just not playing ball, regardless of time of day, lighting conditions, weather etc.

I've updated the firmware more times than I can remember, and this is the best it gets. It just seems unable to replicate what you see on the screen.

I'm willing to accept it might be me, I'm no pro, but it doesn't take an art critic to know that my sony ericsson's pictures are better if that's the best I can extract from the N95 with the brackets showing green, the focus sorting itself out and hinting that the shot should be spot on.

Any tips for getting the shot above taken by the N95 better? Am I too heavily reliant on the autofocus, is there an ideal setting for taking pictures of cars at 10 feet away as the phone seems to love showing me the proverbial finger in the form of red brackets.
For every ten attempts I make at getting the autofocus to do it's thing, 9 of them give me a red bracket, unless I'm stupidly close up, regardless of settings.

I just want to get a few nice pictures, nothing more, nothing less.
Any tips?

Heeeelp!! lol

Cheers for reading, apologies for the long post / rant / explanation.
Stu

[beano500]

There's a lot of things to comment on potentially. But first, I think it's quite marvellous that you can get anything as good as you do out of a 'phone! It's not that long ago that the idea of a mobile 'phone was an amazing sci-fi thing of the future.


I suppose my practical thoughts with a camera phone include: "how do you keep the lens clean?" I've just got a new 'phone, myself, Nokia 6300. I got it so that I can make 'phone calls, but now use it for internet on the go, music, texts (sorry that should probably read: "txt&quot and even take pictures! (Still prefer the Nikon, though and waiting for the opportunity to say, Crocodile Dundee style "call that a camera" as I whip it out...)

One of the most important parts about digital is the processing of the image, so I suspect that the difference between the two devices could simply be down to this. They may be optimised in quite different ways. Perhaps you can download the images and give them some tweaks in an editing programme (Of course you just may have a dud?)

[cbcbcb]

After less than a minute of post processing (contrast, saturation, unsharp mask) it comes to life a bit:


Don't know anything about the N95, so I don't know if you can make it produce this sort of result directly

[DIW35]

If trying to take a good photo rather than just a record for posterity, why not use a proper camera? Or is that asking the obvious?

I have a Nokia N80 and am happy to use it as a camera if I need to photograph something on the spur of the moment, but will always use a 'real' camera for planned shots.

[Stu R]

Thanks guys

DIW35 said:

If trying to take a good photo rather than just a record for posterity, why not use a proper camera? Or is that asking the obvious?

I have a Nokia N80 and am happy to use it as a camera if I need to photograph something on the spur of the moment, but will always use a 'real' camera for planned shots.

I use the camera on my phone fairly often, as for obvious reasons I don't carry my SLR and it's gear around with it. I've got a non-SLR camera too but the missus has swiped that for her holiday.
I've taken loads of great shots with my previous phone, not perfect by any means but certainly impressive for a phone. I've seen some good pics taken with the nokia and it bugs me that should I see something worth taking a photo of when I'm out and about it's likely to come out blurred etc.
I know they're no substitute for a proper camera, but they're handy for me at least when out and about and something worth snapping is spotted.

As far as tinkering with the image on a comp goes, I wouldn't know where to start really and would rather they were taken well in the first place if I'm honest, never needed to alter them before now so it's puzzling and mildly frustrating.

Cheers for the help, I'm going to have a bit more play with the settings and ranges etc tonight to see if I can get something worth keeping from the camera.

Cheers,
Stu

Edited by Stu R on Saturday 11th August 18:15

[GetCarter]

Hi Stu

I keep a small, lightweight 'point and shoot' in my pocket for those bugger, where's my DSLR moments. Hardly bigger than a phone but MILES better quality and the battery lasts more than a couple of months withount need for a charge. IMHO camera phones are nowhere near the quality of compacts (at present!).

Edited by GetCarter on Saturday 11th August 18:47

[VxDuncan]

Looking at the posted pics there's a number of things going on. They second one has an almighty blur in the top right corner. As said, this might be dirt on the lens, or possibly simply cheap optics. Shooting into the sun doesn't help here. There's also a fair degree of chromatic abberation, though that is understandable given the sky brightness. Looking at the wheels, the images seem seriously over sharpened. I'm guessing the main problem with the images is that they are seriously compressed into small jpegs (with jpeg sharpening applied to counter the softness).

Therefore I'd suggest cleaning the lens, seeing if you can get the file sizes any larger and less compressed, and keep the sun behind you.

Hope this helps!