Mass market is rather predictable and it has been proved by time that it’s not just enough only to introduce a veritable and functional product and it will be swept away from the store shelves by the aspiring customers. There’s a lot of other factors that make up a successful product – the handset size nowadays being among the key requirements. The very forward-looking Nokia N93 had little success with customers not due to its high price, but rather because of its unacceptable size – smartphones should stay compact in size, imitating a PDA is essentially a bad idea as far as dimensions are concerned. To prove the guess we might just cite the mere fact of Nokia N95 being both more pricey and way more successful with customers due to its reasonably compact size.

This model’s specs are simply stunning for a handset of such modest dimensions, just a year or two ago nobody would have believed it could exist. This gives us a reason to brood over the complicated stuff inside this small casing that provides such a broad functionality. However that would be another story, it’s time to have a look at the other contestant that’s about to enter the ring. The K850i is the latest sequel to the well-known camera phone series by Sony Ericsson so one could also expect miracles from it on the image acquisition front. The handset has an unusual design tempting a customer’s attention (probably to the prejudice of ergonomics, however that’s a very personal matter) However quite a usual set of features is hiding beneath the ambitious looks, the functionality of K850i is rather modest in comparison to the ingenious N95. On the other hand, the manufacturer doesn’t try to boast the device up into being an all-embracing gadget and that does them justice. Instead K850i is presented as a high-quality camera phone with that exclusive feature as its primary advantage, targeted at a much more broad audience.

Taking in mind the recent camera phone rush, it’s easy to catch the ironical sense of the situation. It happened so that three different camera phones supplied with comparable 5 Mpix cameras appeared on the market almost simultaneously: Nokia N73, Sony Ericsson K790i/K800i and Samsung D900. The Finnish brand’s goodwill multiplied by the new product’s superb functionality did its best, so N73 took the top place in sales charts… D900 presentation was also supported with a good deal of advertising, besides it also was an extremely thin slider in addition to the camera, which also brought it considerable market success. K790i/K800i doesn’t drop behind either, sporting high sales in a number of countries. If we were to set aside small details, we’d see that each of the three brands did their best to make their new products as sound as possible, making strong competitors to each other. The only thing left that could affect the sales in favor of one of the three was release dates, which ironically coincided. Today we have quite another story: much to its advantage, Nokia N95 hit the shelf in April and took over the top market segment completely in a quick bloodless assault.

The early release of N95 gave the Finnish company a huge advantage; the marketing campaign of the new Nokia phone was in full blossom by the time when the competitor brands announced their future releases for the same market segment. Also this provides an advantage in price: when Sony and Samsung release their initially overpriced, would-be-rival products, N95 already will be through the main sales heat and its price will favorably differ from that of K850i and G600. Being a most remarkable innovation, N95 comprises a brand new revision of the integrated experimental navigation chipset, a revolutionary form factor (double slider) and the first Nokia’s collaboration with Carl Zeiss, its yield being the amazing 5 Mpix quality camera. N95 has good chances of dropping its price to the same or lower level with that of K850i and G600 on the day of their release, winning itself an even more advantageous market position furthermore – at least the one thing you can be sure of is that N95 is not going to submit to the upcoming competitive products. To do them justice, N95 is by no means an absolute leader in every spec and feature, it’s just the overall combination thereof that makes N95 a really merit phone. Getting down to details, one still may find out that some of the rival handsets’ features are going to be even smarter in comparison to N95, however few to none customers regard details separately – it’s the phone you buy but apparently not a paper bag with a camera, a radio set, a walkie-talkie and what not inside.

There’s little use arranging stage fights between the three since N95 is bound to triumph with its above-than-advanced functionality and winning looks. But when it comes to details, there’s going to be quite a bit of dispute about the camera quality because one of the anticipated rivals, namely K850i, will have a camera that could give N95 a good chase.

K750i was thought to be Sony’s proud manifestation of their leading position inside the segment. Over a while this status was challenged by the rival companies, Nokia almost beating the leader in the last year’s camera phone drive (neither of the two came winner after all). Sony Ericsson succeeded in creating a sound image for their camera phone products, giving them a leader feel through the use of smart and handy solutions like the backlit shortcut panel, designer interface and brand navigation system. The parent company of Sony, Cyber-shot, only added to the product reputation by the mere sound of the brand. However Sony wasn’t able to hold ground for too long – Nokia shattered their positions with the blockbuster phone N95. Much to Nokia’s advantage, some of K750i’s leader image had already faded away by that time due to it being considerably older as compared to the new pretender, the latter sporting even broader set of functions. Talking in advance we’d especially mention that the big deal about image quality turned out not as simple as it appeared after the first quick look.

Today’s contestants are mobile cameras coming with Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson K850i respectively. Both handsets accompanied us for over a few weeks, producing tons of pictures in all available models so that we could be sure about the winner. We won’t be bothering you with such a vast photo exhibition of little artistic value, giving you just a few most obvious examples in a quick but informative comparison to let you try to choose the best camera yourself like we did.

This article is exclusively devoted to a detailed comparison of the two cameras; you can find out more detail on each of those in the respective reviews of N95 and K850i alike. The next article will be devoted to the third competing product, Samsung G600 – the first 5 Mpix Samsung camera phone on the European market.

It’s worth mentioning that both contestants (K850i and N95) were presale samples. We also did a few test and weren’t able to see any difference in photo quality between our copy of N95 and the one already available on the market. On the other hand, the final build of K850i might provide for even better camera quality though no big difference (if any) is expected.

Hardware

Dimensions and weight keeping on the same level, K850i strikes its first blow on N95 simply by having a classical form factor which suits better for taking pictures. The camera cover of K850i slides away automatically while you have to uncap it by hand in case of N95. The latter, combined with the strict design and the heavy square contour of casing, gives N95 a Darth Vader look. Although design is out of the question, it’s still important to consider the utility. The K850i camera cover is located beneath the front panel glass; the latter tends to accumulate grease and requires periodical cleaning. N95 camera is less exposed to grease, however it comes at a price: it’s more susceptible to physical damage and dust, especially when you forget to shut the cover back.

The obvious weak point of N95 is the lack of a camera mode switch button – the K850i has a three-position slide button switching between Photo, Video and Gallery.

Similar to K810i, the right button row has backlighting. The 3 button stands for camera mode switch, 6 sets the aspect, 9 sets the timer, # operates the flashlight. That’s what gets the handset rather close to common digital cameras, looking familiar even to a least sophisticated customer. The bad thing is that there’s still no full-blown Flight Mode support – you have to have a SIM card in when you turn the device one, though the battery slot is designed in a way that lets it be easily removed right after. But that just doesn’t justify the flaws – a camera phone should be able to take pictures in any situation no matter if it has a SIM card or not.

The N95 camera is supported with a LED flashlight while the K850i has a xenon one like in K790i/K800i. However it doesn’t make a big difference in image quality, so its practical use should not be overestimated.

Software

The camera software load time is little longer in the case of N95 as compared to the Sony handset, but in practice that’s no problem. Both interfaces are equally convenient. Both handsets are designed for horizontal shooting, so the camera uses landscape orientation. It’s quite easy to switch between camera modes, access the settings and effects via an interactive icon row at the bottom of the screen when you activate the viewfinder. In other words, you don’t need to open any context menus, everything is accessible in a few clicks right in the viewfinder mode.

There’s no real difference in settings, Sony Ericsson having a slight advantage over Nokia thanks to an extended shooting mode list that features the overly advertised BestPic mode. There’s full support for direct blogging, but the N95 seems to be a win here since it also supports this through Wi-Fi – a noticeable benefit considering the size of images taken at a 5 Mpix resolution, let alone VGA videos.

Both models are quite functional, handy and have nicely designed photo galleries. In addition to those, Sony Ericsson features extended file filtering options and an embedded motion detector which provides for automatic aspect orientation switch depending on the way you hold your phone. This really makes the Sony phone better on this front, literally turning upside down all the stereotypes and conservative patterns so habitual to the Nokia phones. It was not until the end of the year when Nokia smartphones first gained an automatic aspect orientation switch.

Shooting

K850i has a smaller screen which stands for better contrast, while the gamma balance is just a bit worse than with N95 – a slightly dimmer picture with less saturated colours. Camera response time is remarkably worse in comparison to K850i. The relatively high quality of both screens makes the photos look equally good. Now let’s get down to the shooting itself. We used the auto mode in all cases, which helps to make a less prejudiced assessment of image quality.

Outdoors, daytime

Taking daytime pictures outdoors seems an easy task for the latest mobile cameras, but there’s a number of points which are very important here – for example, shooting darker objects against a bright background. Looks like K850i nearly failed the task:

The N95 produced a more saturated image with a realistic color rendering. All the small details are still easily distinguishable in the picture which scores it a few more points leaving K850i behind with its blurred and light-struck photos.

When there isn’t too much light K850i manages to cope with the task, however the blur persists. It’s easily recognized when you compare the pictures to those taken with a N95 – while the latter keeps the details sharp and colorful, the K850i gives a dull and blurry image.

The next example is sure to disabuse those who were worshipping Cyber-shot camera phones for their color depth, blaming Nokia handsets for taking unnaturally colored photos. The popularity of this belief is quite comparable to its wrongness. There might be something to it, by so far we’ve only encountered vivid and bright colours in N95 pictures but those by no means looked unreal or unnatural.

As we have already mentioned, both camera phones were used in Auto mode. So what do we get here? We don’t want to look as if we were to blame SE for putting a really bad camera inside the K850i, but here you go – as long as those signs look pink on the pictures instead of their real-life red colour, the K850i camera can not be dubbed as flawless. So it turns out that actually it’s the SE phone that indulges in such a vice as unnatural color rendering – if not always, then at least in a good number of cases. While The N95 image post-processing algorithm does a good job making picture more bright and deep, the K850i tends to corrupt the photos in a way. However it would be reckless to think that the N95 camera is godly, it’s a sure winner in this part of the contest. Images taken with it are obviously closer to the real-life picture as compared to K850i photos.

Here go a few camping landscapes – an example of what you should get while shooting outdoors. Another myth is about to be taken down – that one accounting for the poor Nokia image post-processing algorithm. Take a closer look at the Kremlin star, especially the ornament. N95 makes it possible to recognize details while K850i gives a good deal of blurring. It becomes quite clear which of the two actually corrupts details… But wait, there’s another important thing. As we already told you, both cameras were in the Auto mode. But many users set the sharpness preference to Hard manually, guess what they get? Unrealistic, screwed pictures that was probably what gave birth to the above-mentioned myth.

Quite a plain picture, but what makes it interesting is the auto ISO adjustment system - note the amount of noise in the K850i picture and it’ll become clear that N95 does the job much better. We advise the owners of K850i to do ISO adjustments manually, there’s no use relying on the automatics. Below follow a few more examples:

We guess these pics are persuasive enough. But among the flaws there’s an advantage on SE’s side at least in the last pictures. K850i manages to do a better job at color rendering, probably due to a lower contrast. But the blurring is still in on the deal, just check the background. So when it comes to daytime outdoors shots, Nokia is an absolute winner.

Outdoors, nighttime

The flashlight is of little help when the distance is great, so we decided to turn it off completely. There’s nothing you can do or say to help Nokia here – SE takes its revenge and leaves the rival far behind. Pictures by N95 are swarmed with artifacts and light traces, so the image quality leaves much to be desired.

Well, the above statement doesn’t go with the Macro mode – with the flashlight on K850i also produces poor quality images.

Indoors

Taking pictures indoors is quite another story. Light sources easily mislead the camera automatics, often causing it to adjust the white balance in a wrong way. As you see from the pictures below, the K850i got totally confused by the treacherous lights:

If you have ever been to the Mayakovskaya subway station you’d recall that such an abundance of yellow is but a corruption of its normally white lightning as seen in real life. N95 did the job quite well, the photos sporting a better detail and color depth – again, look at the background.

The backlit domes look noticeably more natural as shot by N95, but detail is still a bigger concern in this case – but N95 is again leading on either side.

Following the subway theme, let’s give another glimpse of portrait shooting indoors. One might expect N95 win here as well, but much to our astonishment it was K850i that produced a considerably better photo save for a bit blurry background. Look how N95 camera renders the hair – it’s overcome with artifacts, besides the face is blurred which is clearly not the case of K850i.

The last photo in the series – a detailed panorama of the inside of a Moscow supermarket. The intense good lighting yielded the same result as in the outdoor daytime test. The SE phone produced a more vague image that looks like it needs some editing to match the superb photo taken with N95. The latter displayed a bad habit of processing the image just a bit too intensely, but still the photo is as good as it comes.

Macro

Rendering small details adequately is not an easy task for a mobile camera. It only came true quite recently when the auto focus function was first introduced. Both handsets sport auto focus capabilities, but Nokia N95 requires a greater focus distance which doesn’t add to the handset’s handiness. During the testing the K850i was able to auto-focus in the majority of cases while on many occasions Nokia failed to do so until you moved it farther back from the object. To make things clear we made a few pictures taken from a same distance:

The difference is best seen on the doll picture – the K850i fails to render the colors correctly in this case. We used a standard white A4 sheet of paper as a background which was rendered by the K850i as slightly blue. N95 did well with the colours but the auto-focus got a bit screwed – check how the face and the wings are rendered on both images. Similar to the previous photo, the Finnish-made handset failed to do some decent auto-focusing when we took the picture with the keys. Looks like you have to pick the K850i if you plane to shoot a lot of close-ups.

There’s a lot of noise in the SE pictures here – the camera fails to auto-adjust ISO here as well, possibly the poor-quality UltraMacro of N95 could prove even better here. Though on some pictures it’s hard to tell the winner due to a closely comparable quality:

While the K850i does better at close-ups, N95 scores a win at longer distances:

Another test for the macro mode was shooting an A4-sized printed document. To make the task more difficult we turned the flashlight on and took pictures at a custom angle:

Quite expectedly K850i won. Just look at the farthest row of letters to make sure.

Zoom

Both cameras have digital zoom but the N95 has a maximum magnitude of 20x while the K850i only gets to 16x. But when we tried that in practice, K850i produced a bigger picture at 16x than its Finnish counterpart at 20x! It has nothing to do with the resolution since it doesn’t affect zooming. Looks like Nokia makes use of a non-standard zoom ratio factor that roughly corresponds to a time and a half of that of Sony Ericsson. We tested the cameras at a same zoom ratio; below we added the same series but taken with K850i’s maximal zoom:

Nokia N95 Outdoors

Nokia N95 Indoors

SonyEricsson K850i Outdoors

SonyEricsson K850i indoors

No matter what you do, K850i is the champion while N95 lags behind. Although don’t overestimate this factor since zoom corrupts proportions and thus is rarely used. You can always use the image editor to achieve the same result.

Flashlight

SonyEricsson’s xenon flash produces a milder light, but surprisingly the camera phone refused to take images with both flash and macro on. This clearly wasn’t an intermittent glitch since it never ceased happening.

Another quirk of the xenon flash is that it often ends up with only light sources seen in the photo and little else. This could be critical to club-goers – it’s really nasty when poor automatics cause the whole image to come corrupt. We hope this will be fixed in future firmware patches.

Video

Nokia’s top smartphones have always been traditionally strong at video shooting and N95 is not an exception. Despite if K850i’s QVGA support, it still lacks quality in a horrible way as compared to the neat N95 clips.

Impressions

Sony Ericsson were able to design a well-balanced 5 Mpix camera phone which isn’t bad at all at taking pictures but it has very few advantages over the N95 while the latter was able to beat its competitor in quite a number of tests. The K850i is still very strong at zooming and macro shooting, let’s take a look at superb macro rendering like these:

The hardware design of K850i is extremely successful, making it a handy and easy-to-learn digital camera, simplicity being a huge benefit. The motion detector is quite an intriguing features, and the gallery feature is rather good as well. But taken as a whole, the handset doesn’t have any far-advanced functions in comparison to the Nokia’s flagship N95. It gives us an expectation that a situation similar to the last year’s will take place again, when N73 sold better than its rivals, and N95 is going to have even better sales – not because K850i turned bad or is just an intermediate product making way to a more advanced successor but largely due to N95’s outstanding qualities, even considering its high price (which derives directly from the total lack of competitive products) By the time Samsung and Sony release comparable solutions, N95 will drop in price to a reasonable level.

It’s totally up to the customer to pick one of the two so you should judge by your personal preferences and intentions – that’s why we arranged this deathmatch. Some users will find enhanced macro and zoom to be the critical feature and some will vote for better contrast and color depth. We are not raking any final judgements – the opinion stated above is still an opinion, yet backed up by practical evidence.

Author: Dmitriy Ryabinin, dm@smape.com

www.smape.com

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