Cell Phones Blog

Nokia N93 was just released on the market and it’s still not available everywhere in the world. Because of its extended photo and video capabilities we believe that the most of the future N93 owners are interested in the quality of its camera. Until we are able to publish full review of the phone we are presenting you some photo and video samples and also some comparison shots to Sony Ericsson K800. Both phones are final versions, but of course some future firmware updates might improve the camera quality.

We are comparing the Nokia N93 photo quality to Sony Ericsson K800, only because we had one available, not because the two phones are direct competitors. Sony Ericsson K800 will compete on the market with anther recently released phone - Nokia N73.

Please note that the optical zoom lens doesn’t automatically mean better image quality, in fact in most of the cases it means just the opposite. With the optical zoom you get extended zoom range, but at any given focal length of the zoom lens you would hardly get better quality than the one from a corresponding fixed focal length lens. The reason for this is that for the zoom lens you need more glass elements, which generally results in worse quality pictures.

Nokia N93 has a complicated construction - it can take many forms depending on what you are going to use the phone for. The swivel joint allows the display to rotate in several directions. You can use the phone as a normal clamshell or you can rotate the upper part and put it in the best position for a viewfinder. Otherwise, the full phone description is beyond the scope of this article.

The Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 3x optical zoom autofocus lens in Nokia N93 sets new standards for the mobile phone cameras. The zooming takes place inside the camera, so there are no protruding lens elements. So far only Sharp has offered optical zoom models (take Sharp 903 for example), but with 2x zoom only.

You can see how Nokia N93 compares to the not so small Sony Ericsson K800. Indeed, the N93 is a really big phone. If you consider the Nokia N90 model big for your need, then most probably you would not like the successor either, because it is even bigger.

One of the main selling points of the Nokia N93 marketing campaign is its “DVD-like” video recording quality. Of course providing VGA video capturing at 30 frames per second is something unique in the mobile phone world and this alone deserves respect. We leave to you to decide how close these video samples come to DVD recording quality.

One of the main selling points of the Nokia N93 marketing campaign is its “DVD-like” video recording quality. Of course, providing VGA video capturing at 30 frames per second is something unique in the mobile phone world and this alone deserves respect.

The captured video is way better than the ones made by Nokia 6233 which also shoots video in VGA resolution but at half the framerate. Comparing the results to those produced by some of the latest A-series Canon digicam models like Canon A620, the videos captured by Noka N93 lose a bit. The results from a real digital camcorder, however outperform the videos of N93 by a wide margin. But after all, nobody expects from a mobile phone to beat a real dedicated video recording device.

In the end, we leave to you to decide how close these video samples come to DVD video quality.