Nokia’s most recent imaging flagship, the Nokia N86, claims to be one of the best camera phones on the market. With an 8MP camera sensor, a wide-angle lens, a Dual-LED flash and an aperture size that should make clear night photos, it is clear that the N86 8MP has the big guns out. But the main question remains about how its camera performs in comparison to Nokia’s tried-and-true camera flagship, the Nokia N82 with its Xenon flash and 5MP sensor
We performed a real-life comparison, and you can see the results below. First up, is a series of images taken on a picnic out in the Vincennes area in Paris, France. The N82’s images are on the left, the N86’s are on the right.
The first difference you should notice is how the wide-angle lens on the N86 makes you feel as if the pictures were taken further away from the point where the N82’s pictures were snapped. This isn’t the case in reality. I was holding the 2 phones next to each other and snapping the photos.
The second difference you should see, is that the N82’s images have much more of a yellow’ish feeling to them, which makes the colors look faded in most of the green areas (most visible on the 3rd photo comparison), but turns out a real nice picture in the Castle (4th photo comparison).
The third thing I’d like you to look at is these last 3 pictures taken at night. It’s true that the Xenon flash on the N82 has a very clear advantage indoors, but put it outdoors with objects far away and it fails to perform. This can be seen in the first two photos taken at night, where the buildings and the trees in the background are captured with more detail on the N86 thanks to its lens’ aperture size. While focusing on nearby objects (the can of coke), the N82 still outperforms the N86 but not by a huge margin.
All in all, I believe the N86 is a true successor to the N82, and the wide-lens, large aperture, bigger sensor, and video light advantages should be taken very seriously. You shouldn’t forget that it also has a Panorama mode built-in, and now with the v20, face detection and an improved camera performance.
What do you think of this comparison, and is the N86 in your opinion a great N82 replacement, or are you looking at other devices like the Samsung Omnia HD or the Sony Ericsson Satio?