Out of all the nifty features the Nokia N8 offers, the most talked about has to be the 12 megapixel camera. It can really make you feel like a professional shutterbug, creating crystalline, sharp and vivid images with automatic exposure and white balance controls. The results deliver impressively natural pictures with superbly saturated, authentic-looking hues. If you like your mobile phone to contain a first-rate camera, you need look no further. The N8 definitely provides you with one of the finest examples of shutter technology.
Camera Specs
Xenon Flash – Flash photography is incredible with the Xenon flash, packing a real punch and doing a brilliant task of illuminating dusky or night shots, as well as improving the quality of pictures taken during the day. Far superior to the standard LED flash, it surpasses digital cameras such as the N900 with dual-LED. It should be taken into consideration, however, that the flash does suck the battery dry at an alarming rate.
Auto-Focus
The N8 has a face recognition feature, if enabled, which is both as fast as that of a digital camera as well as being capable of tracking movement. Average focussing time takes about 350ms, and comes complete with a red to orange auto-focus light to assist your shot when it’s dark.
Video Quality
The video is level with most HD-compatible mobile phones. It films at 25 frames per second, managing to capture everything but fast-moving objects with smooth finesse. The 720p of resolution ensures you’ll get clear clips with ample detail and quality, making use of H.264/MPEG-4 encoding. Audio quality is fairly impressive, with a 48KHz AAC stereo. The HDMI port also enables you to transfer anything you film directly to your television, a handy little feature to have. Other features include colour toggle in video mode, and reduced frame-rate low light option.
Sharing
Sharing is generally restricted to being transferred via e-mail or Bluetooth. This can be a little troublesome, as the fantastic look of the images may tempt many to place them up on Facebook, Photobucket or Flickr.
Photo tweaking features
When it comes to editing images after having taken them, the N8 has a few useful features for you to play around with. You can rid photos of red eyes, resize, crop pictures down, add text and frames and drawing. It is probably better to do the majority of your editing on the computer, but the post-processing app can come in handy.
ISO sensitivity
The N8 has three options for the ISO setting – automatic aside. You can choose between low, medium and high: low being ISO100, medium being ISO400 and high being ISO800.
GPS
Nokia slipped in a little extra to help the creative have their memories perfectly in place when taking pictures. The GPS system is capable of saving the exact location of any image you shoot, ensuring that every photo has an area caption.
Undoubtedly, the N8 has high-end camera hardware capable of taking incredibly professional photographs; well worth consideration for shutterbugs.
