The Nokia 6500 Classic comes with a 2.0 megapixel camera which is capable of taking pictures up to 1600 x 1200 pixels in size. Nokia have included seven lower resolutions including 160 x 120, 320 x 240, 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1152 x 864, 1280 x 960 and 1600 x 1200 sizes to save space. The quality of the photos captured can be varied between Basic, Normal and High quality and included are most common features and settings one would expect in a camera phone. While the camera has an autofocus, it does not come with macro mode.

The camera settings include adjustable white balance (daylight, tungsten, fluorescent and horizon), effects (false colours, greyscale, sepia, negative and solarise) and an 8.0x digital zoom (although this degrades picture quality as high resolution images are just being cropped when zoom is used). There is a shutter delay timer (which can be varied between 3, 5 and 10 seconds). Nokia has opted to include a LED camera flash on the 6500 Classic and generally these flashes tend not to be very effective. The one on the 6500 Classic is pretty weak. As soon as photos are taken they are immediately saved and can then be attached to messages, sent by Bluetooth.

The camera responsiveness is rather slow as the 6500 Classic takes a little while after the button is pressed to take a photo. Saving photos to the phone is also slow and at full 2.0 megapixel resolution one should expect a delay of about six seconds between shots due to the saving of the file and then navigating back to photo shot mode. Photo file sizes range from 30KB for a 320 x 240 photo to 1900KB for a SuperFine quality 2048 x 1563 shot. The picture quality is average – the colours do tend to look washed out. Using the camera is mostly intuitive although some of the camera options and settings are a little scattered and it’s still difficult to quickly navigate to and find the setting your after.

The Nokia 6500 Classic also includes a video recording mode with many of the same features (zoom, white balance) as when taking photos. It is also very easy to switch between camera and video recording modes by pressing the right and left directional buttons while in camera mode. Videos can only be recorded at two resolutions (128 x 96 and 176 x 144) and the quality of the video captured can be varied just as with photos. Videos can be restricted to a size that is suitable for MMS messages. The video is nothing to get excited about as the quality is only really good enough for phone use. Viewing a video on a computer screen really shows up how poor the quality is.

The camera does take a while to boot-up, taking about 3 seconds and is accessible through the menu list or in the active standby menu. Example photos shown below show that the Nokia 6500 Classic’s camera is fairly mediocre.

  ^{Previous page}

(Page 2 of 5)

^{Next page}   

Nokia 6500 Classic Review

Table of contents:

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