Carl Zeiss Helsinki

I’ve just started to use a Nokia N73 (amongst others) for testing things at work, and I decided to try out the camera. I’m very impressed. The photo below (posted directly to Flickr using the Nokia’s built-in software) was taken a few minutes ago in downtown Lugano…

I don’t think I’ve seen a camera phone that could cope with a backlit scene like this before. The detail and sharpness are pretty good, the colour balance may be a touch cool, and a smidgen magenta, but it isn’t far off. The 3.2Mpix sensor (which must be minute) and the Carl Zeiss Tessar f2.8 lens seem to work pretty well.

With this sort of progress, the demise of low end (at least) point & shoot cameras cannot be far off. Ok, so it hasn’t got a viewfinder, and the shutter lag is sometimes (but not always) dreadful, but we’re certainly getting there.