Pixel counts are on the up everywhere. The compact market is now pushing the 12MP mark with 10MP cameras being commonplace. Phones are now catching up and when I saw the press release about a 3.2MP phone with auto focus Carl Zeiss lens I just couldn't resist. We pitted phone vs camera.
The contenders
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Representing the phone market we have the rather tasty Nokia N73 Three Mobile X-Series. If you remember our trip to Focus we were posting pictures directly to the website using this phone and X-Series mobile Internet. This boasts 3.2 million pixels, a Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.8 lens with 20X optical zoom and can upload pictures directly to Flickr and store them on a MiniSD card. Oh and it also lets you call your mates too. Sim free it will cost you around £260 - £300.
Fighting for the honour of the camera world we have the Fujifilm F20. I'm going to be honest with you here - I contacted all the major manufacturers and asked them for a 3 million pixel camera. They kind of laughed and then said “no”. Fujifilm said “no, but maybe the F20 will do”.
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We clicked with:
LOADS of features.
Sleek size and design.
Direct internet upload.
Pictures far better than we expected.
Shots in the dark:
Image quality no match for a budget camera.
Expensive.
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The F20 is a couple of models back now but we had to set it to “medium” quality to give around the same resolution as the phone. It has a Fujinon 2.8 lens with 3X optical zoom and 6.2X digital zoom - that works out to very similar to the Nokia when you add the optical and digital zoom together. Native resolution is 6.3MP but we turned it down to 2048 X 1536 mode - almost spot on the same resolution as the Nokia. Street price is about £110.
Ease of use
Nokia N73
Pretty easy actually. Amazingly easy for a phone camera. Slide back the lens cover and not only will you expose the lens it flips the phone into “camera mode”. Frame up your shot on the back screen and press your dedicated shutter button to take a picture. Just like most digital cameras the picture is displayed right after you take it. Unlike most cameras there are then a bunch of further options including send via MMS message, via email, via Bluetooth, via Infra red or web upload.
There's also a dedicated play button so you can see your previous masterpieces. One feature I particularly liked is that the icons on the right of the screen slide away to give you more “real estate” when you lightly press the shutter. Some of the latest cameras do this but it's very welcome on the N73 which has a substantially smaller screen than most cameras.
Fujifilm F20
It's a camera. Turn it on and press the shutter button. You get a picture. The Fuji control system is pretty well evolved and one of the easiest to use. It's hard to imagine anyone having difficulties using this camera.
Verdict
F20 wins by a nose. 5 minutes with either device and you should have your first picture. The camera is marginally easier because it doesn't have so many features but I was very impressed with how easy it was to use the phone as a camera.
Features
Nokia N73
More than you could ever shake a very large stick at. Not only will it take pictures it will do the following “photo related” tasks for you.
Keep your diary and contacts for you so you know where you should be and who you should be photographing. I just synced it with my Mac via Bluetooth and all the diary functions and phone numbers were there.
Stop you getting bored while waiting for a shoot - there are games and a rather good MP3 player and radio.
Let you send pictures to a client to review (or your mates to laugh at) the instant you take them.
You can also send and receive email and browse the web. I found both these functions pretty hard to use. This was partly because I don't get on with T9 text input and partly because I struggled to find a browser bar where you could enter a real URL.
Email was frustrating to type and web surfing pretty much limited to links from the 3 favourites page. I found myself longing for my trusty MDA compact with its full keyboard and great web browsing.
You can also make calls...
I was again pleasantly surprised at the camera features. There are half a dozen scene modes including a self timer. This is paltry by current standards but plenty for the modes you will actually use. There's also a flash and you can set white balance and exposure compensation just like on a regular camera. All in all the camera features are what I'd expect on a full featured budget camera - there are enough to ensure that you can get decent pictures in most situations.
It's probably worth pointing out that there are two cameras in the N73 - the rear one of for taking pictures. The front one is for video conferencing (yeah, right) and for taking really bad pictures of yourself. It is much lower resolution than the “real” one and all our test shots were with the rear camera.
Fujifilm F20
15 scene modes, exposure compensation, ISO that goes up to 2000, anti blur (actually it just uses high ISO), macro mode. This is about as fully specced as entry level cameras get - but that's all it does. No music, no internet, no phone calls.
Verdict
Amazingly I'm going to give this one to the N73. The F20 has more camera features but the N73 really has enough. It was the exposure compensation that swung it for me - in most circumstances you will be able to get a decent shot. Obviously it kills the Fuji with all the other features.
Performance
Nokia N73
Start up time is a sluggish 4 seconds. That's with the phone already turned on, you slide back the cover and it takes just over 4 seconds until it is ready to take a shot.
Shutter response is pretty slow. OK if it was a real camera we'd be laughing at it. On a stationary object to autofocus and shoot takes a good couple of seconds. Shooting moving objects is tricky to say the least. However, this is pretty much where cheap compacts were a year or two ago so we shouldn't be too hard on it.
Battery life is very hard to judge. We had no problem using it for a couple of days shooting pictures, uploading them to the web and making calls. For a weekend trip I wouldn't bother with the charger unless you talk a lot.
Fujilfilm F20
Press the power button and the camera is ready to shoot in a shade over 2 seconds.
The same static subject test took just over a second to focus meter and shoot. That may not sound a lot but there's a big difference between 1 second and 2 seconds when you are shooting moving things.
Battery life is good for 300 shots according to the Tipa standard (which mimics real world use) and I found no reason to doubt that. Again for most people this will be a decent weekend without bothering with a charger.
Verdict
F30 wins - but this section is probably only significant if you try shooting moving things. For stationary subjects there's surprisingly little to choose.
Picture quality
OK, this is where the going gets tough and is the bit we were really interested in.
Let's deal with the bad stuff first.
Carl Zeiss make some of the best lenses in the business. The lens they put on the N73 is not one of their best. Look closely and you'll see pretty much every fault you can get in a lens. There's fringing and distortion and by any photographic standards the results are below average.
The N73 has a built in flash. It's rubbish. At a pinch it might get you a picture in a dark pub of club that you wouldn't get with another phone. There's just enough power to give plenty of red eye but not really enough to get you a nice picture.
Low light performance is pretty patchy too - the N73 seems to top out at ISO 640, 1/15s and f2.8. That's enough to take pictures in reasonably dark circumstances but they get pretty noisy. OK they are very noisy.
It will come as no surprise that on every test we could come up with the Fujifilm F20 produced a better image that the Nokia N73. But in the end you could say this doesn't matter at all - I stopped comparing the images because on 20” widescreen monitors the F20 image was always better. Usually a lot better. Instead I tried a different test - I took a snap with the N73 and took the phone straight in to a high street lab.
They looked very dubious when I asked them to print a 10X8 from the Mini-SD card. An hour later I popped back and the lab staff were amazed - it had actually produced a very nice print. 10X8 inches is really pushing it for a 3MP camera - it's below 200 ppi which is where I reckon you want to be for a decent continuous tone print.
I looked closely at the picture. To me it's obvious that it's from a low spec camera but then I knew that already and I look at pictures all day. I left it lying around the studio for a week and showed it to everyone who came round. The usual response was “nice picture”. Nobody guessed that it was taken with a phone or commented that it was a low quality picture.
In act, many of the image quality issues are to do with jpeg compression rather than poor quality capture. A 2GB card will hold nearly 3,000 pictures - I reckon Nokia could reduce the jpeg compression and produce some rather nice pictures.
Conclusion
Here's the bottom line - two of us from the office tried out the N73 under a variety of circumstances. Both of us agreed that if we were getting a new phone it would be the N73. The quality doesn't stack up against a decent Fuji but it produces pictures that are perfectly good for web use or even 6X4 prints. With the right image and conditions, even a 10X8 is possible straight from camera. With very careful editing, who knows?
A year ago, this test would have been a joke. Camera phones produced tiny blocky pictures that looked more like security videos from Crimewatch. Now we are comparing them to a rather nice camera. OK, the camera wins every time on image quality but as a package there's not as much in it as you might think - who knows what will happen when we try this next year?
