How to Spot a Psychopath

A reader asked me what I thought of Nokia's N73 and Sony Ericsson's K800i, two fancy mobile phones with autofocus 3.2-megapixel cameras in them, which make them quite different from the awful crunchy fixed-focus phone-cams of old.

(Note: Picture not to scale. I just stuck two press photos together.)

I can't honestly say that I can recommend either of them.

I thought they both looked pretty decent when I started writing this, and I still agree that they're better than run-of-the-mill cameraphones. But I think you'd have to place an unreasonably high premium on single-unit integration to make them really worth having - especially considering how much they cost (immediately when purchased outright, or eventually in service fees).

This isn't to say that either of them are rubbish, though.

Most of the sample pics I can find from the N73 look OK. There are some problems, though. The N73 doesn't seem to have a huge amount of exposure latitude, so you get blown-out highlights in a lot of pictures:

(Click through to the larger versions to see what you're meant to be paying for in these more expensive cam-phones.)

When there's less image brightness variation to worry about, though, it's quite good:

Note that it's doing the standard consumer-camera thing of punching up colour saturation in every image...

...which can sometimes combine with exposure problems in unfortunate ways:

...but, by and large, it seems to be up there with lots of OK cheap compact digicams.

Except for the lack of optical zoom, of course.

One other pitfall in many consumer cameras is that they have lousy light-gathering ability - a high minimum F-number. Since small-sensor digicams also can't do high ISO settings without lots of noise, this can matter a lot for many ordinary medium-to-low-light situations, including most indoor photography.

Nokia don't seem to even publish the F-number for the N73's lens, which is extremely remiss of them; I had to look at the press photo of the lens to read the "2.8/5.6" from around it.

I presume that means it can do f2.8 wide open and f5.6 with an aperture reduction doodad switched in, and that's it. That means max aperture f2.8, focal length 5.6mm (real focal lengths for small-sensor cameras with reasonable field of view are very small; that's why they're usually specified in the marketing bumfodder with "35mm equivalent" focal length specifications, which leave purchasers mystified when they notice that the lens itself has some tiny number printed around it.)

F2.8 is OK, but it means that non-flash indoor shots, even during the day, will be grainy, blurry, or possibly both.

On to the K800i, which gives some great examples of this.

Its F-number is a freakin' secret, too. Again, I had to turn to press pics to find it. F2.8, again (that's what the "1:2.8" around the K800i's lens means).

I'm being careful not to make snap judgements from Flickr pics, because people may have processed them poorly or fiddled unwisely with camera settings. When cameras only have digital zoom, though, it's possible to make truly awful pictures by using lots of said zoom.

Dear god.

Ignoring those sorts of pictures, there are plenty of decent K800i pics, too.

This is pretty good - not horribly crunchy or blurry:

Mildly blown highlights, but they're no biggy.

Here we go again with the highlights, though:

And look at the crunchy stuff and noise reduction artifacts in this, when you view the larger versions:

Then again, this is quite good:

Again, it's got unnaturally high colour saturation (though the reason why consumer cameras do that is that people like these "punchy" results out of the camera, even if they throw detail away), but there's only a little blue fringing on the high-contrast edge at the top of the building, and no horrible distortion or sharpness loss at the edges.

But then again, look at this.

It was obviously not dark when this picture was taken, but look at the big version and you can see that all of the fine detail has been "watercoloured out" by noise reduction, because the camera decided it needed to keep its shutter speed up by cranking the ISO (the EXIF data says only ISO 80; if that's the truth then something really awful is going on...), and then noise-reduced the result.

And bang, there goes most of your resolution.

You can get lost in all the technical bulldust about cameras and ignore the fact that the above picture really is a very good photo, which you unquestionably would not be able to take if your phone was just a phone and that was all you were carrying.

But when your camera deliberately destroys most of the detail in the pictures you take, leaving you with something that can't be printed any bigger than an old 110 negative without looking strangely flat, you may still feel ripped off.

And when there's no zoom, this is more important, because you'll be cropping pictures more often. (The digital zoom crops the picture for you, of course.)

Regarding the deadly combination of low ISO sensitivity and high F numbers, check this out:

It's a daylight shot (unless I, and the camera time stamp, am very much mistaken), but the camera still went to ISO 200 and 1/13th of a second for it, and as a result created a blurry mess.

This comparison figures that the K800i is more like a real camera than the N73 or N93, but their example pictures are pretty bloomin' ordinary. They're what I'd expect from a good compact camera in 2001, at best.

Overall, the most I'd pay for the camera portion of either of these cam-phones, in today's market, is $US100. OK, there's the one-device convenience factor that might make the camera worth much more to you - but you can buy really excellent compact cameras for $US300, these days, and the over-the-counter price for the K800i is, what, $US500? The Nokia's not much cheaper.

Given that there's an embarrassment of choices in the ultra-compact-under-$US200 market sector these days (go nuts with the DPReview comparator...), I really couldn't justify paying any significant premium for a camera of the quality of the ones in these phones.

I mean, you can pay less than $US200 and get a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 (combined review of it and its siblings here) these days. That's got not only real zoom, but also a proper optical image stabiliser, not just one of those phoney baloney high-ISO modes, which Sony brazenly try to palm off on you with the K800i.

Yes, these cam-phones do beat the hell out of old-style fixed-focus cameraphones with no flash, plastic lenses and webcam sensors. But so does a Box Brownie.