Mega Gallery: Happy Halloween with the Nokia N8! Incredible Extreme Low Light performance for Nights Out!

Happy Halloween folks! If you’re out and about tonight, perhaps in costume, you’ll certainly be wanting to save those memories. A phone won’t do right – you’ll have to bring your camera too.

Well…

One of the reasons the Nokia N82 has triumphed for so long is it’s undisputed performance in EXTREME low light – which is absolutely perfect for nights out. The last thing you want to worry about when you’ve had a few is your phone AND a camera (as well as your wallet/keys/cards/cash). Having one less thing to worry about is essential.

How does the new blood fare?Well whether in a pub, club (or in a London Film Premiere :p) the N8 does a bang up job and takes up the N82’s challenge successfully.

Here’s

The Awesome:

• Passes extreme low light tests with flying colours. Literally. Amply lights up people in the dark with the xenon flash without washing them out (too much). Colours do look better on N8 vs N82. Less washed out (w’ell, we’ll upload the comparisons we did a while back

• Freezes any action. Your LED enabled camera phone may be able to light up a scene half as good as xenon, but it will inevitably suffer from movement blur. That’s not good because people – they are prone to moving. What also really helps is the very fast autofocus and very fast shutter upon pressing the camera shutter button. This is often taken for granted but my Samsung WB600 would wait a second after pressing. It doesn’t matter that the flash can freeze if the action is already over.

Pillow Fight. Frozenby N8

Pillow in the Air and Nokia N8 captures it.

Moving Foreground freeze with nice background blur.

Falling on the Na'Vi

• Great for night portraits: Note- a lot of folk are wearing facepaint, and most of the girls in general not in face paint are wearing make up/foundation which shows up a little differently under flash than bare skin – e.g. check out arm/neck. (Hence why the faces of the guys look more natural)

• Awesome for group shots

Same 9MP 16:9 in 12MP 4:3

• The N8 was NOT fully charged yet managed to take well over 300 photos ALL WITH FLASH, 8 mins of video, 20 mins calls, 30 mins text and somehow report only 1 bar missing from 8pm to 3am. This maybe incorrect battery life reporting, but if so the N8 would not have lasted until 7pm the next day. (It got to about 4 bars by 9am – killing all background processes severely helped – and the N8 didn’t die. Once on 1 bar it went back on charge)
• Note: N8 was on full brightness in normal mode. You could possibly extend the N8 battery life by pressing power button once and selecting “Activate power saving”. This will push your N8 to 2G, reduce screen brightness amongst other things..
• The 3.5″ AMOLED screen makes a perfect view finder. Excellent viewing angle means you can still see your subject even if you place the cam at awkward angles.
• Simple enough operation for other people to use. Other folk just assume it’s a camera.
• not N8 specific feature – but the camera strap hole/strap is positioned at the right place for right handed folk – (not so with N900). Makes it easy to protect your N8 from dropping.

The not so good.

• In Auto mode, suffers from MAJOR red eye. Helps on Halloween but possibly not any other night. There’s red eye reduction function but seriously – due to the annoying camera UI every time you restart the camera it forgets you set it on red eye. On the upside – I’d rather have red eye than shitty, blurry, dark LED lit photos. NOTE: In a pub (or elsewhere where it’s not virtually pitch black) red eye is less of a problem.

• The uncovered camera glass means it will suffer greatly from smudging which will make focusing difficult if there’s crap on the camera glass. It also affects flash photos. You can just wipe it, but remembering is a task. Especially if someone else is taking your photos and aren’t aware of that problem.

I think this one was combined initial focus error and camera smudge. But I kinda like the effect.

Smudge and focus problem. Focus problem due to intoxication but smudge assists in not being able to autofocus as well as it could.

Focusing again - a little better but there's still smudgey stuff on the camera which I forgot to clean for this pic

All in all STELLAR job by the Nokia N8. Fantastic low light performance that surely would make N82 users proud. Full sized pics available in the gallery

Tags: 12mp, 4000*2248, 4000x3000, Camera samples, Halloween, Low light, Nokia, Photos, Sample, Test, Xenon, Xenon Flash

Category: Nokia, Nseries