I had a discussion yesterday over mobile phone cameras. My opinion is they are normally ok but will never replace a proper camera. The lens is too small, as is the sensor and the distance from the lens to sensor is too close. I'm not going to put my neck on the chopping block and say they are all bad but they are not good either.

The camera in a phone is great for snapshots but that is about it. I have a Nokia 5800 and the camera is not a patch on the Sony 800i mobile phone I still have (though the phone is miles better).

Cameras are often mis-sold on it's mega-pixels with a belief the more mega pixels it has the better the camera must be. This is not true, the important part of a camera is the lens. The photo from a camera with a good lens and a resolution of 3mp is far better than a camera with a cheap lens and a resolution of 5mp.

The results from an iPhone are very poor especially if the light is less than direct sunlight. From experiance the Sony is better than the Nokia.

I ask will the camera on a phone ever replace a proper camera or will it always be just a handy extra?

They are a lot better than they used to be, it wasn't so long ago they were all awful. That said they are not a replacement for a proper camera and I can see that changing any time soon. Glad you bought up the megapixel nonsense, in fact too many on small sensors can lead to noisy images.

Whats interesting is that one of the first autofocus mobile cameras - the K750 - has yet to be truly beat, at least for stills.

The K800 was maybe a little better, but the flash was relatively weak. Actual sharpness of image and detail, there was no real world (ie. printed) improvement from the K750 to the K800. Stick the old add-on flash to the bottom of a K750 and it would rival any compact point and shoot - surprisingly capable, even by todays standards.

In fact, with that add-on flash, the K750 (or W800/W810) was easily equal to most dedicated compacts.

I do take issue with your comment of " they are not a replacement for a proper camera". What constitutes a "proper camera"? It can't be what most people see on the shelves - compact cameras, either cheap (with tiny sensors, akin to that on mobiles), or massive zooms that are therefore compromised at several points within their range (if not all).

So it can only be an SLR. At which point its great for image quality, but carrying around lenses can be a chore/inconvenience.

At the end of the day, the best camera is the one that you have with you

Indeed SLR is exactly what I meant by proper, compacts are great for what they do but you can't beat a decent quality SLR. Where I do get a lot of use out the Camera on my Desire is twitter and the like, they're great for taking a quick snaps and sharing in no time at all.

Aye, nothing beats an SLR, even an average one.

Although they are fairly bank-breaking. I've got urges for a macro, prime, teleconverter, and a decent range walkabout lens .... the current 17-70 and 70-300 are okay, but a little restrictive. And swapping the pseudo macro on and off on the 70-300 is ... awkward.

Some mobiles are possibly equal to compacts on picture quality. I've occasionally been surprised by the picture quality from mobiles - put together some shots for a couple of blurb books, back cover of one was taken on an N95 - unless you were told it was from a phone, not many people would realise. Although the stand out shots have always been with the DSLR

I would agree with you there with the old iPhone but the iPhone 4 takes very good pictures for a 5MP phone, in fact it's probably the best 5MP phone I have used. It also takes very good HD video at 30FPS.

For someone who takes holiday snapshots and so forth it's perfect and would replace a camera but if you into photography then it's not as good as a £100 camera.

Well they certainly keep you poor.


I was looking at some pics from the iPhone4 and they do look a lot better. They are certainly better than the desire, HTC need to get their act together with their cameras, while the Desires is a lot better than the unusable camera on the Hero it's still not great and isn't what you expect from a phone in that price range.

I'd say that devices like the iPhone 4, back to the older N95, N73, K800, etc. are probably as good as a £100 camera. Nowhere near as many pixels, but as we know, thats no indication of quality. I did side-by-sides of the N73 against a compact when I had it (Casio EX-Z600), and the N73 definitely had the measure of the Casio - much sharper focus, especially close up.

The mobiles at least have optics designed around one focal length, rather than having a cheap/compromised zoom. A £100 cameras optics won't generally be that good - look at the cost of a decent zoom lens on an SLR - quality optics cost ££££.

Why won't someone do a side-by-side of the iPhone 4 against say a K850, N95 and a Nokia N82. It would be quite interesting ....

I'm getting superb results using my Sony Ericsson W890i with it's 3.2MP lens and that's in spite of it lacking flash and autofocus.

Image compression results are probably just as critical to good photographic output as is the quality of the lens.

In terms of camera phones the sensor size (hence pixel size) is probably the biggest thing that gives better results. The lens has a bigger input to "real" cameras (simply because the sensors are bigger).

Nokia N8 is believed to have a sensor as big as a normal digital camera (although nothing like a DSLR)

Doesn't matter how great the lens is or how many pixels you have if you can't see what you are taking. You don't get many view finders on cameras these days let alone phones.

It all starts with the lens though, if you do a really good job of compressing the image from a rubbish lens it still looks rubbish

But your point is still valid, which is why most serious shooters use a RAW format and let a computer handle the bayer interpolation, colour balancing (little known fact: pretty much all digital camera sensors have the same number of green pixels as they do red and blue combined) and compression as in-camera algorithms are written for speed, not quality to make up for the hardware's lack of processing power.

Yep, you're right. In the first instance, a good lens is absolutely necessary. The point I was trying to make was that poor compression can rubbish the image obtained by a good lens.

Incidentally, I recently compared results taken with an LG Cookie. Samsung Tocco Lite, Nokia 6300 and Sony Ericsson W890i. The W890i won by a long mile....it was like pitting a group of grainy 110 cameras up against an 35mm SLR.

Very much so, and there in lies the advantage of shooting RAW and leaving the developing / compression to a proper computer. I wasn't disagreeing

I use a Canon G9 which is an extremely good compact with the versatility of an SLR and it still has a viewfinder. Though I don't use the viewfinder that often it certainly has an advantage. Not putting a viewfinder on a camera these days is just a way of making the compacts cheaper and perhaps a wee bit smaller. The G9 is not cheap but a good alternative to a weighty dearer SLR but unfortunately doesn't have a phone in it. perhaps that's the next to come, a phone with a built in camera?

When I got my old Nokia N95 a few years ago, I was initially sucked in by the "FIVE MEGAPIXEL CAMERA!!!!!" feature.

I was soon unimpressed though, as the compression was awful & the photos looked worse to me than ones taken with my ageing 3MP Canon digicam.

No use having a 5MP sensor if the JPG compression is fixed at a stupidly high level

Ah, but the compression was *very* easily amended .....

G9 is definitely not a compact. And its got a digital viewfinder, hasn't it? The versatility of a DSLR is from the ability to swap lenses. The G9 doesn't have that option?

Its good to see that the latest in that range has finally dropped the insane interest in pixel counts, going for a lower count than its predecessor in order to get better sensitivity.


Can't remember the stated size, but the sensor is actually supposedly larger than that found in most compact cameras.

Now, i just hope and pray that Damian Dinning and his team have finally given the camera control over the compression used - fine, standard, etc.

Surely you can't undo over-compression

You have to edit some system files - the level of JPEG compression was set to a level (85?), you just needed to increase that value, say to 90/95/100, images were larger and you had less in the way of JPEG compression artifacts.

I amended it in both the N95 and N85 while I had them

The image on the link below was taken by my t-mobile G2 (HTC Hero)

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/3113/crane2.jpg

Sometimes the best camera phone is not always current models there's alot of 5MP ones around on smartphones but have HD recording.

For taking a standard picture, especially low light and detail the Sony Ericsson C905 is the best camera phone I've used. And it is better than the current Satio as the flash is not as good and the increased megapixels take awful 16:9 photos.

So C905 best camera phone I've come across. Going back a few years look at Nokia N95, K800i.

I had a n95 and k800i and the iPhone 4 takes better pictures than both them, however I like a dedicated button to take pictures rather than pressing the screen.

What I would consider to be a way of "*very* easily amending" the JPEG compression would be a simple straightforward option within the phone's settings, accessible without hacking the phone or messing around with system files.

No such option existed though when I had my N95, & AFAIK no such option exists now.

I checked through the settings when I got my N95 - no compression options.

I then searched Google - only found forum posts by other people wanting to know the same thing.


I've just done a search now, & found some more recent results from 2009 (after I had my N95), detailing how you can change the compression by first hacking the phone, and then going in & editing system files. One thread though said it would not work on the N95, as it's not running the required version of Symbian S60 3rd Edition (FP2?).

I guess it is actually possible, as you say you did it, but even so it's not exactly the most straightforward thing to do.