The N95 sports one of the best digital cameras available in a phone today. The combination of a Carl Zeiss Tessar auto-focus lens with a five megapixel CMOS sensor goes a long way in making the camera practical for many situations. Such a large sensor size allows for pictures that can be printed onto A3 paper without a loss in quality. These pictures are 2592x1944 pixels in size, but you can specify smaller sizes as well – 3M (2048x1536), 2M (1600x1200), 0.8M (800x600) and 0.3M (640x480). Pictures seem to have one fixed quality level as I couldn’t find such an adjustment setting anywhere.

The camera application is started by opening the lens cover on the back of the phone. It takes four seconds to boot, which is a bit slow compared to other phones. Saving speed is respectable – a full 5M picture takes about six seconds to process and save. Smaller sizes save quicker. The auto-focus can be slow at times though – my two year old Sharp 903 focuses faster than the N95 usually manages to. In addition I couldn’t get the camera to focus on close-up objects at all unless I changed the scene mode to close-up (more on that below). I’ve seen plenty of other phones focus at close range without a setting change, so I’m not sure why the N95 can’t do it unless close-up mode is activated.

Digital zoom of the interpolated type is allowed on all resolutions at up to 20 time magnification, allowing you to ‘zoom in’ on a subject. This type of digital zoom decreases picture quality so I don’t recommend it however. A flash LED works quite well in dark scenes, although it also has night mode to increase light sensitivity without using it. If you prefer to take pictures of yourself to send to friends, you can use the forward facing CIF camera which is normally reserved for video calls.

There’s plenty of customisation for photos. You can change white balance, light exposure, colour themes (such as sepia), ISO sensitivity, contrast and sharpness. There’s also several preset scene modes to adjust all parameters depending on the situation, such as sports, landscape and close-up. The camera can also detect which way you’re holding the phone and save a picture vertically or horizontally. This is very handy if you’re taking a picture in a rush. Finally, you can choose from four different shutter sounds but you can’t turn it off completely.

In terms of camera quality the N95 generally does a good job. My main concern is the slight purple/pink tinge throughout a picture, easily visible where the sky is rendered. This seems to be a problem camera phones have a hard time shaking. There’s also slight pixel stair-stepping effect visible when five megapixel pictures are viewed at their native size, but other than this the N95 creates some great pictures for a camera phone.

The N95’s video capabilities are excellent. Videos can be recorded at VGA (640x480) resolution at an ultra-smooth 30 frames per second. The camera barely manages to hold this speed even when there’s a lot of movement, making video recording extremely practical here. Videos are saved in MPEG4 format, while audio is also well preserved at 48 KHz using the AAC codec (unlike many other phones saving only in 8 KHz using the AMR narrowband codec). There are also smaller resolution and frames per second options to choose from (including an MMS restricted mode), while the microphone can be disabled for quiet video.

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Powerhouse with the Nokia N95

Table of contents:

Overview (Page 1)
Camera & Video performance (Page 2)
Major features (Page 3)
Problems/Issues (Page 4)
In Summary/Checklist (Page 5)