Photo Comparison: Nokia N95 vs. Sony Ericsson K800i
齋睇影相黎講 N95都唔係太掂
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Quickly following on the heels of my Nokia N95 review, our man in Hong Kong, Samuel Chan, took some time to shoot a few photos over lunch with the N95 and Sony Ericsson's K800i. This isn't exactly an apples to apple comparison, since the N95 has a 5 megapixel camera sensor and the K800, which has been on sale for quite some time, has only a 3.2 megapixel sensor, but I still think the samples are worth looking at. As you will see, megapixels are not everything when it comes to digital photography.
All of these shots were taken with the cameras set to their automatic white balance modes. All of the photos were lit with daylight. Some were from direct overhead sun, some from daylight coming through windows. But all daylight none the less. This puts the N95 at somewhat of a disadvantage, as its white balance system works better with artificial light based on my own experiences. You can see that most all of the N95 photos in this series have a a magenta color cast to them. The K800 photos might look a bit more cool in color than I would like, but they are still much more accurate overall.
The real difference, however, is when you look at the details. The N95 photos turn out very heavily processed looking when there is not a lot of light available. While the shots of Sam's hand, with its near-perfect lighting, show that the N95 is capable of capturing the full 5 megapixels worth of detail, most of the other shots look blotchy due to the N95's noise reduction algorithm. Many of the K800 photos show much more detail than the N95 photos due to this. You will also notice a lot of digital sharpening on the N95 samples. Too much of it, in fact. Look at the edges of the banner in the photos directly below. The banner in the N95 photo has very dark edges. This is caused by over sharpening.
When it comes to the autofocus systems on these cameras, they seem relatively evenly matched in terms of accuracy. They each miss the mark occasionally, but work well enough in general. Both lenses seem to be decent as well, though it appears that Nokia's Carl Zeiss glass exhibits a bit less pincushion distortion than does the lens in Sony Ericsson's K800i.
For my money, the K800 takes better photos in general real world situations - in spite of having 1.8 million fewer photosites on its sensor. The N95 is certainly capable of taking better photos than the K800 when the conditions are right, it just seems that those situations are not as common as one might hope for. |