Video: Samples of the Nokia N86's impressive DIGITAL zoom
Earlier in July, the All About Symbian crew discovered a rather brilliant feature in the N86 that was never spoken about by Nokia. Real, usable digital zoom that preserved much more detail than previous/standard methods.
James Burland from Nokia Creative, using the Steve’s same N86 shows us again exactly how good that zoom is in this video (at a bird sanctuary?)
Just check out the obvious detail there. At times, I forget it’s zoomed in as on every other mobile device, digital zoom produces blocky pixels that make you regret using the digital zoom afterwards. With the N86 is a practical feature (well for video anyway)
This isn’t exactly how it works but when capturing a VGA video, but basically instead of zooming in on the 640×480 pixels, thus loosing detail and producing blocky artifacts, the N86 instead uses the entire 3264×2448 and (depending on zoom level) crops a portion of it to VGA, maintaining more of the detail than usual.
It’s not optical zoom, but it’s a very useful alternative and very effective up to 4x/5x zoom.
Via Nokia Creative
Here are some more video examples from N86 user ChampionJohnny
In this first video, look how at first the text is unreadable. But with the N86′s quality digital zoom, you can read even the smaller print.
In the second and third video, note again how much detail is maintained up to 4x digital zoom
Note: viewing on fullscreen on a desktop may make the videos appear more blurry – but that’s because they’re only VGA resolution. They would probably be even more impressive when Nokia ups the ante to HD ( 720p and maybe even bring back optical zoom)
Jay, once again your take on things is superb. When are we going to team up for that podcast? ^_^
Can you believe it’s been nearly two years since Unlock L.A.? !!!
Hey Mr B.
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Take? Nah, this is entirely a Burland affair. Loving all your recent run of tests on the N97/N86.
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We can try again with the podcasts whenever you want to try them again
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2 years? Wow – haha. I still remember when I saw you at the Airport – woah it’s THE James Burland of the creative life. haha. The whole LA thing was utterly surreal.
humm…kinda wish i just got this instead of the N97 now….aaaggghhh lol…humm should i buy this as well! lol
So does this same digital zoom come into play when using the zoom for still photography, or is it a separate system. I ask because I’m thinking of buying the N86 for occasional use in digiscoping — ie, through a telescope lens. A zoom is needed to eliminate vignetting (the circular field of the scope lens), but unless it’s optical then the image produced is degraded. Wondering if the N86 would avoid this, even though there’s no true optical zoom. Chris