Nokia Lumia 928: Xenon Flash Fan test – freezing the blades

Something we always like to see in xenon capable cameras like the N82, N8 and 808 was their ability to freeze motion, particularly in low light situations where blur is expected.

http://mynokiablog.com/2010/10/31/mega-gallery-happy-halloween-with-the-nokia-n8-incredible-extreme-low-light-performance-for-nights-out/

In the Nokia Lumia 920, it gathered in more light by opening the shutter for longer and compensating blurs with OIS. That was awesome for situations where flash was never going to help you, like scenery that’s far away (or also where flash would have ruined the picture and ambient light would have been better).

In the 928 you kinda get the best of both worlds for photos as the xenon flash is capable of freezing motion, but you still have OIS to assist in removal of shakes or you can have no flash to make the most of the ambient lighting (and freak out when you see the camera sees better than your own eyes).

You can see in the shot above how the 928 appears to have taken a picture with the fans not turning. Not too sure about the colours but that’s a whole other thing.

http://mynokiablog.com/2012/11/15/fan-test-nokia-lumia-920-vs-nokia-808-pureview-led-vs-xenon/

With OIS or OIS with LED, you tend to capture the background as well as the foreground (less so with flash on, and even less with xenon). That’s not always the case of course, but that’s how it has been in my experience with phone cameras. I wonder how the 928 will fare.  I thought the image below looked pretty cool.

http://mynokiablog.com/2013/05/11/lumia-928-video-and-photo-samples/

Xenon brings in much more light that you can reduce shutter speeds and reduce motion blur. Not the blur from your hands but the blur when things (like people) move.

I like xenon flash for my low light people photos (e.g. on nights out. I mentioned back in November that the 920 was good for that but not as good as the 808. It has improved since then and definitely trumps every other smartphone out there for low light people/xenon that’s not the 808/N8. ) I love the OIS on my 920 for the sheer fact that I can hap-hazardly switch the camera on one handed, and snap a picture of anything with shaky hands and the pictures still look great (documents, outside scenery, daytime shots etc).

Having both? Crickey. The Nokia Lumia 928 potentially solves the challenge I’ve had about Nokia since the days of the N82. The great all around camera and a great web browser. I said plenty of times before that I would have been happy even getting the N82 camera (or a regular 5MP with xenon). Now we’re expecting the EOS to trump the 928 but until then, this is the first Nokia for me to fill the smartphone and camera brief fully (unless you’ve had xenon before in your phones, 920 fans aren’t missing much).

Cheers dss for the heads up!

Category: Lumia, Nokia