Hardware & software, speed, and detail
Want a phone with a decent camera? Nokia makes some of the very best, and if a camera has the PureView badge, you can be pretty sure it's going to be something special.
But what about Nokia's cheaper cameras? We're going to compare a range of phones from across the Nokia Lumia range to see what PureView gets you, as well as seeing how well Nokia's sub-£100 phones perform out in the field.
Do you really need to spend hundreds of pounds to get a decent phone camera?
Meet the contenders
Nokia Lumia 1020
PureView: Yes
Resolution: 41MP
Lens: f/2.2
Released: July 2013
Price: From £270
Nokia Lumia 930
PureView: Yes
Resolution: 20MP
Lens: f/2.4
Released: July 2014
Price: From £405
Nokia Lumia 635
PureView: No
Resolution: 5MP
Lens: f/2.4
Released: June 2014
Price: From £133
Nokia Lumia 530
PureView: No
Resolution: 5MP
Lens: f/2.4
Released: September 2014
Price: From £80
Hardware and Software
Nokia has tweaked the way its phone cameras operate in the last year or so, but the basics remain pretty similar across all these phones. The Nokia camera app gives you easy manual control over camera settings, even in the bargain basement Nokia Lumia 530.
It is a bit confusing, as there's also a standard Windows camera app on all these phones, but we wouldn't trade away the extra control the Nokia app gives you. For the purposes of these tests we've used the Nokia app, and left all of the settings to automatic – just to keep things fair.
We need to make the terms as fair as possible, because the hardware of these phones is completely different.
The Nokia Lumia 530 and 635 both have small 1/4-inch sensors, while the Lumia 930 uses a good-size 1/2.5-inch sensor and the Lumia 1020 a gigantic 1/1.5-inch one. In any camera, the sensor is what harvests the light that produces a photo, and the larger a sensor the better it usually is at dealing with tricky lighting conditions.
Resolutions are completely different too. The Lumia 530 and 635 have 5MPs a piece, the Lumia 930 a 20MP sensor and the 1020 a jaw-dropping 41MP one.
There's also the lens to consider: the other side of the camera hardware equation. The bit we're most interested is in the f-stop rating.
This tells you a lens's aperture in a phone, which determines how 'fast' it is, how much light it can suck in. Yes, we know what the pedants will say: 'nothing sucks in light but a black hole', but you get the idea. As such, it can be used to offset a smaller sensor a bit.
Here's a surprise: three of the cameras have the same lens aperture. The Lumia 930, the Lumia 635 and the Lumia 530 all use f2.4 lenses, while the Lumia 1020 has a slightly faster f2.2 lens.
The surprise here is that the Lumia 930 lens is so slow. While Nokia may brag about its Carl Zeiss optics, loads of Android rivals offer much, much faster lenses. The HTC One M8 has an f2.0 lens for example, which aids low light performance among other things.
Performance, Speed and Action Shooting
You may also be a bit surprised by the basic performance of some of these cameras. If a camera can't focus quickly and dash shot-to-shot quite nippily, you'll most likely miss the action.
Before we get onto actually picture quality, we have to start on a bit of a downer: none of these cameras are much use for action.
When shooting at full resolution they are all relatively slow. Next to the Samsung Galaxy S5 they seem like arthritic grannies shuffling down the queue in the post office.
What's really disappointing is that the top-end Nokia Lumia 1020 is the worst of the lot. It's very, very slow. You can only take a photo about every four seconds. If you're trying to take a picture of a fast-moving object, you only really have one shot with the 1020. As beautiful as that shot may be, it's a deal-breaker for those wanting to shoot birds or brats.
The Nokia Lumia 930 isn't too hot either, but it is at least a bit faster. We never expected much from the Lumia 635 and 530 in terms of speed, but it's unfortunate to see them outpace higher-end phones.
Detail
To test out these cameras' detail levels we took them to the beach. A pier is a good subject for a detail test, thanks to all those railing down the side. And you can grab an ice cream after too.
Click here for the full res shot
Without zooming in, the only phone that doesn't appear pin-sharp is the Lumia 530. It's quite obviously a bit soft, lacking the razor-sharp edges of its siblings.
Zooming in a bit closer, we see why the Lumia 635 has managed to appear as sharp as the much higher-resolution phones. There's clear sharpening taking place, which is why you see the outlines drawn around the 'legs' of the pier.
Click here for the full res shot
So while the Lumia 635 looks sharp from a distance, it doesn't really have the detail that bears cropping into too much for enlargements. Still, for a 5MP camera it's a decent performance.
Click here for the full res shot
There is also some sharpening in the Lumia 930, funnily enough, just to a much lesser extent than the 635. Only the Lumia 1020 produces truly natural-looking fine detail right down to pixel level.
Given the Lumia 930 has just half the resolution of the Lumia 1020, it's good to see it is able to get pretty close in terms of rendering fine detail. Look at the railings and the stripes on theshirts, though, and the Lumia 1020 image is a little bit cleaner.
Click here for the full res shot
Here we're comparing full-resolution images from the two higher-end phones. But as standard both phones actually capture much lower-res 5MP images (although some picture interpolation occurs with Pureview to get a more detailed shot, as you can see).
When shooting at this lower resolution, there's very little to separate the Lumia 930 and Lumia 1020 shots. Let's have a look at how the high-res versions compare to the lower ones:
Click here for the full res shot
If you're looking to keep your photos for posterity, we recommend making sure you now when you're capturing lower-res and higher-res pics. You can select this in the Nokia camera app.
Colour, depth of field and macro
Colour
While Nokia's phones do not excel on shooting speed, they are generally very good in terms of colour accuracy. Other lower-end phones in particular often suffer from horrible colour balance. Generally you'll often see reds looking either undersaturated or badly overblown in an attempt to avoid photos looking desaturated.
Click here for the full res shot
We took a picture of a colourful art installation on London's South Bank to see how these cameras deal with displaying several bold shades at once. We're impressed.
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While the lower-end phones tend to show a good deal more variance between shots in terms of colour and white balance, in our test shots colour balance is remarkably natural and consistent. The Lumia 530 reds get a little close to toxic levels, but otherwise saturations are fairly even across the board.
For a second test, we took a picture of some beach huts at the seaside – these have more gradual tones, offering a different kind of challenge.
Click here for the full res shot
The Lumia 635 is a little cooler in tone than the others, and the overall warm tint of the Lumia 530 means colours are slightly less well defined on the low-end contender.
But the consistency here is impressive – other manufacturer's lower-end phones often bring horrible colour reproduction to the party. We'd ideally like to see the Lumia 635 warm up a bit, though.
Depth of Field
Depth of field effects have become trendy in the last 12 months. It's where the background (or foreground) is blurred-out. Phones like the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5 offer modes to let you 'fake' this effect.
The real deal is a function of lens and camera sensor. The bokeh (that's the character of the blurriness) depends largely on the lens, but the extent of it is also determined by the size of the sensor, due to the camera's crop factor.
If that sounds too techy, just look at the demo to see what we mean. The larger sensors of the Lumia 1020 and Lumia 930 are much more capable of producing a nice blurred-out effect than the smaller-sensor Lumia 635.
Click here for the full res shot
Click here for the full res shot
Click here for the full res shot
The Lumia 1020 is the clear winner here though. It offers the most pronounced, smoothest, blurring effect, and its warm colours really work wonders on this scene. The phone also offers the shallowest depth of field – the area which is in focus. It may sound like a bad thing, but it's really not.
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Unfortunately the Lumia 530 totally fails this test as it does not offer autofocus. Its lens has a fixed focus, meaning it can't actually focus on something specifically. This also rules-out being able to take close-ups, which should make the macro test coming up a bit interesting.
Macro
Macro photography: it's all about making your subject appear larger than life by getting really up-close with it and revealing details you just wouldn't see or notice with the naked eye. The two key factors to a good mobile macro photo are being able to get nice and close to the subject and having good fine detail and decent colour reproduction.
There's only one winner here: it's the Nokia Lumia 930. While the Nokia Lumia 1020 can produce the best photos out of all these cameras, its minimum focus distance is quite poor. You just can't get all that close-up.
Click here for the full res shot
To explain the demo: we tried to get as close to the leaf as possible while keeping it in focus. Ignore whether the attached berries are in focus or not as what we're trying to do here is to render the fine little 'hairs' on the leaf you'd never normally notice.
Click here for the full res shot
We also see here that the Lumia 1020 can tend to make its colours look a little larger-than-life than is strictly accurate. In the demo, the leaf is just that bit too green.
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The Lumia 930 shot is lovely, with natural colour and loads of detail. While the Lumia 1020 manages to hold onto a fair amount of detail thanks to its super-high-res sensor, it'd do even better if it was able to get closer-up.
Click here for the full res shot
For its price, the Lumia 635 does very well here. The colours aren't as sophisticated as the Lumia 930's, but it has managed to pick out those little hairs.
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Thanks to the lack of autofocus, the Lumia 530's attempt is a bust. You can't get remotely close to the leaf, ruining our chances of seeing the fine detail we're after.
Dynamic range, night & low-light and verdict
Dynamic range
A lack of dynamic range is why mobile phone photos often look dull or overexposed. With fairly poor dynamic range, a phone has to judge exposure compensation carefully and it doesn't always get it right.
Other phones get around this by using HDR modes, which merge multiple exposures to artificially boost range. But Nokia's phones don't offer a proper HDR mode. It's something we've been complaining about for years.
We decided to test these four phones' dynamic range by shooting a very tricky scene – where the sky is cloudy but very bright. In this sort of condition, the phone needs to decide whether to overexpose the sky or leave the foreground looking pretty glum. Unless it has the dynamic range to cope, that is.
Let's have a look.
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Only one phone here demonstrates decent dynamic range: the Nokia Lumia 1020. It hasn't dramatically overexposed the sky, but the grass in the foreground is much brighter and the highlights in the trees more obvious, than in the 930.
Click here for the full res shot
If anything, the Lumia 930 seems a tiny bit worse than the Lumia 635, although in both the foreground is very dull-looking.
Click here for the full res shot
The Nokia Lumia 530 takes a different approach that – funnily enough – leads to what is probably the most satisfying photo.
It has overexposed the sky to bring out more detail in the foreground, making it as bright as the 1020's. The strange warm tint seen in the other Lumia 530 photos is very apparent here, though.
Click here for the full res shot
While this test shows the Nokia Lumia 1020 is the more adept of the four, it also shows that Nokia still needs to work on an HDR mode. It's long past due.
Night and Low-light
We've seen a few surprise results so far, but what about the real mobile phone barrier: low light? We took to the streets to take some night shots of Wimbledon theatre to see how these phones cope.
They show that you can't always make up for hardware deficiencies with processing, as the phones with the larger sensors perform much, much better than those with smaller ones. No surprise there.
Click here for the full res shot
We're talking about the Lumia 1020 and the Lumia 930, which have sensors much bigger than the Lumia 635 and Lumia 530.
Once again, though, the lower-end phones have a good stab at holding onto their colour saturation, where colour often flies out of the window in phones as soon as the lights go out.
There's commendably little noise too, although not exactly much detail to go with that.
Click here for the full res shot
Click here for the full res shot
The battle between the Lumia 1020 and Lumia 930 is harder to call. In the close-up the Lumia 1020 is the clear victor with more detail, less noise and more colour. Increased dynamic range comes in handy once again too. Just check out the 'Rock of Ages' sign in the bottom-left. It's much clearer in the 1020 shot than any of the others.
Click here for the full res shot
Click here for the full res shot
However, the Lumia 1020 also suffers from light bleed from a street lamp that's well out of shot to the left. We think this may be down to having a bigger lens and no shielding.
It produces the best photos, but, as we saw with its slow speed and rubbish minimum focusing distance, needs some care and attention to get the most out of it.
Verdict
This comparison goes to show you don't necessarily need to pay the earth to get a Nokia camera with respectable performance.
The Nokia Lumia 635 photos are oversharpened in places and a little cool-looking, but they can hold their own. Only the Lumia 530 disappoints here, with soft images and a flexibility-bashing fixed focus.
Which wins on the high-end side? Well the Lumia 1020 does provide the best photos, but the added flexibility of the Lumia 930 makes it the best all-rounder for everyday use. It's a good deal faster than the 1020, and is able to focus a lot closer up.
The Lumia 1020 remains the photo purists's choice, though. Nothing like a vague verdict, eh?
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