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For this journal entry I am again spanning multiple days, two this time.

I wanted to give this entry some real thought as it is a major point of the N70, the 2mp Camera. Unlike most cell phones, the N70 has dual cameras, and the main camera is a 2 megapixel camera that as you will see soon proves to be a very good camera…and unheard of as far as performance compared most camera phones.

The cameras on the N70 consist of a small (I believe about .8mp) camera on the front of the phone that is for use with video conferencing. Then there is the 2mp camera that is revealed after sliding the back of the phone. This camera sports a 20x zoom and a flash. There also is a small shutter button on the right side of the phone that can be used to snap pictures when you hold the phone like you would normally hold a small digital camera (since the main camera is on the back and the screen becomes the viewfinder).

Before we get into looking at the pictures, do note, the pictures on this page are scaled down, but when you click on them it is the original picture, untouched in anyway. It is simply uploaded to our site so you can see EXACTLY how it comes from the camera. Even the picture names are unchanged.

To first try out the 2mp camera, I tried doing a few shots indoors. To start I took a…

picture of a student in class:

In this picture I noticed that the camera tended to be more on the yellow-green side and this was true with almost all the pictures I took with the camera in lower light environments. It does have to do a bit with the lighting indoors, but it is also the cameras white balance not doing the greatest job.

The second picture is again of a student:

This time I noticed that the camera has a good amount of blur (that can be seen in the first student picture as well). I was very steady, and yet it does blur a bit. Another thing that was apparent after snapping a bunch of pictures was the amount of shutter lag between when you press the button, when it makes its simulated shutter sound, and when the actual picture is taken. The sound comes almost immediately when you press the button, but the picture is taken just a bit after, so do not snap and quickly pull the camera away!

This next picture was again taken indoors of a student, but this time I set the camera on the table while taking the picture (that is why the framing of the picture is off). This helped the blur a bit, but as you can see, the picture is still a bit "soft".

Now this next picture looked pretty good on the small phone screen (and I did not zoom in to check it closer), but when I transferred to my PC I found that it had quite a bit of blur. This is an example of why you should zoom in on pictures on the camera screen, as when not zoomed in this picture looked good on the phone screen:

Finally it was time to check out this proclaimed 20x zoom. To do this (because of the blur I had experienced before) I decided to set the camera on a table. This meant that I really was not zooming in on something that was that great of a target, but it still gives you a very good idea of the zoom. The zoom works by not only zooming in on the picture, but also reducing its size (since there is no Optical Zoom, it is all Digital just cropping the picture down more and more). This means that at the beginning you are at 2mp, then after awhile you get to .8mp, and finally .3mp. It does not skip to these places though, it actually has tons of stops that it hits while you keep press the up button to zoom in, so you can easily control how much zoom you want.

These are not all the zoom points, these are just some that I picked out that were pretty evenly spaced between the first picture here (that is zoomed all the way out) and the last picture here (that is zoomed all the way in). They are in order as well.

I found the results to be pretty good. From a camera with no optical zoom the results are decent. It is amazing how far you can zoom in, but I think it is pretty useless considering if you are not on a table it will be way to blurry, and it is not the greatest quality at all. Another thing that is interesting to look at as you are clicking on the above thumbnails to see the full sizes is the size of the pictures. The first (zoomed all the way out) is 1600×1200 and the all the way zoomed in picture is 640×480.

To talk a bit about the small camera on the front of the phone, all I have to say is that it is decent. It is like most common cameras on camera phones where it is grainy, not very good in different lighting conditions, and there as more of an after piece. I would bet it works great for video calls though as you can see a portrait of yourself very well, and the quality could not be much more or the phone would have to compress the quality down anyways to be able to do video calls.

Overall I would sum up the camera on the N70 as amazing for a camera phone. It has very good results if you are careful and hold the camera steady and it also sports a very good zoom. The flash was decent at close ranges (not bright enough for larger areas), but it was still miles ahead of most camera phones tiny LED light they call a flash. I was also impressed that the photos (when not zoomed in) came out at 1600×1200! All the colors came in very good with the only problem with colors being white balance indoors, which sometimes could push into the yellow-green.

The last thing I would like to talk about with the pictures is transferring them to your PC. You can send them via Bluetooth, Media Messages, etc., but you can also use the Nokia suite to browse the memory card to transfer them to your computer. When browsing on the phone, it looks just like when you browse any other folders on your computer with Explorer, but once you transfer the files (by using copy and paste or by right clicking and selecting download), the copy progress screen looks a bit different and has a very nice graphic as you can see in this picture:

This is all great and worked well the first few times I did it, but after a few times of transfers with no problems, Nokia’s software got to my Media Center Edition machine again and I was greeted with an error that ended up closing the connection to the phone:

And finally making the whole of Explorer crash:

Luckily Explorer came back after a second or two, and after turning off and turning back on the phone I was able to download photos again. There must be something between Media Center Edition 2005 (which is really just XP Pro SP2 with a few extra programs) and the Nokia Suite as I have had quite a few problems with the two, and this is on multiple machines that I have (I have Media Center Edition on most of my machines).

The software works ok for transferring pictures, but it would be awesome if Nokia would use a standard memory card (like SD, MiniSD, Transflash) so that you could get a card reader to use. But instead they have this weird looking thing they call a RS-MMC which I have never seen anything like before. Who knows though, it may be more common (doubtful though) and you may be able to find some card readers that work with it.

Well thats all for now, we are almost done going through the N70 so make sure to check back soon for more updates! And as always, feel free to comment or make any tips/suggestions to what I have said!

Chris Leckness (3531 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.