Nokia 5800 Review 

One year ago, I bought my first camera phone, and I was intrigued by this technology and by the results given by the lilliputian camera embededd into the phone. In late 2008, Nokia announced his first touchscreen phone, the Nokia 5800: on paper it is a great all around device, with wi-fi internet access, a large and bright screen, a good operative system with many applications, and a 3.2mp camera, with AF, flash and video. I have bought the Nokia 5800 one week ago and I have carefully examined its imaging capabilities: in this review you will find both some considerations about the phone in general and some in-depth test of photo and video.

Main specifications and comments

One tool, many instruments

I love the tools that can be useful for many purposes, and the Nokia 5800 is for sure one of them. It is not only a phone, it is also a camera, a web browser, a photo viewer, and much more! In the following list I have described the many tools that it replaces...and these are only the features I use; you can add much more, if you want! 

. Mp3 Player: With 8 GB of memory, it can store all my MP3, and it still has a lot of empty room! The audio quality is excellent, as I previously wrote, it replaces separate Mp3 players. Even though the Symbian OS don't show the Windows folders in the Multimedia area, you can navigate between the folders created with Windows using the File Browser (in my opinion it is much easier to use windows folders than symbian folders; for music, Symbian does not allow to create folders, but you can do it with Windows and with File Browser you can use these folders).

. Entry Level Photo Camera: The 3.2 megapixel camera is great for snapshots (when I'm out with friends, I don't carry with me the 1Ds3!), and it is useful even for some of the equipment photos that I use in my articles. You can even make acceptable prints from the photos taken with the 5800.

. Web Browser: When I am at home I connect with my PC, but when I am traveling, the possibility to navigate with the mobile phone is great! I use it to check my website and forum, to read and write e-mails, and to read the latest news. When I am not in Italy I always connect using Wi-Fi (the costs of cellular internet connection in foreign countries are prohibitive). Web surfing is way better than surfing with my previous Nokia 6120; it may not be as good as the iPhone and its multi-touch interface in this respect, but it comes close.

. Photo Viewer: Very, very useful! I have upload on the 5800 my portfolio and many other photos, so when I met someone and I want to show him my photos, I can show them on the bright, crisp 3.2" LCD of the mobile phone. In the past I carried with me some small prints; now I just carry the 5800, that is much easier to carry everywhere (and it can show hundreds of photos, while carrying hundreds of prints would be cumbersome).

. Video Player: I don't use it as much as the Mp3 player, but sometimes it is useful to show my videos to friends or to view movies (you can watch movies both on the 5800's screen or on television, thanks to the TV out). That said, you can not view DivX movies...I though about loading some movies on the mobile phone, but it was not possible: the Nokia 5800 can't read natively the DivX format as many Samsung phones do, and the divX player for Symbian 9.5 phones is not available yet. The only way to view movies is to convert them in mp4; but even after conversion many movies don't play correctly.

. Calculator: An useful tool, both for work and in everyday life.

. Advanced watch: The mobile is even an advanced watch, that includes calendar and timezones. It is easy to see both the current time and the local time (I like this feature when I am in foreign countries: I can check immediately what time is it both where I am and in Italy, in case I want to call someone in my native country). Other than that, it includes the alarm clock.

. Games: I rarely use them, but sometimes they are a nice way to spend the time during the long waitings in the airports.

. GPS: The Nokia 5800 has the potential to be an excellent car and walk around GPS, but sadly it has been greatly limited by Nokia. To use the full capabilities of the GPS, you have to buy the maps from Nokia Maps, otherwise you can not create routes, nor you can get voice instructions. Since I have already a TomTom 720, I'll never pay for Nokia Maps ;-) Without paying, you can still see the map with your current position, so it can be useful to move around in cities you don't know, when you are walking around and you don't have the car GPS. 

Camera specifications in depth

Photo camera: image quality

You can set many image parameters: color tone, white balance, exposure compensation, ISO sensitivity, contrast and sharpening.  Many of these parameters don't have importance on a DSLR, because you can shoot in RAW and set contrast, WB and sharpening during RAW conversion, but in a camera phone you have to pay attention, because you can only save the photos as JPEG, and some of these parameters can not be changed afterwards. In particular, if the image has strong color casts I recommend to choose manually the white balance (many times Auto WB gives cold tones); set sharpening on the lowest value to avoid artfacts.

100% crop from image sharpened with Photoshop	100% crop from image sharpened by 5800

In particular, the 5800 has an awful sharpening, that gives oversharpened, overprocessed images; by setting the sharpening on the lowest value you are actually turning it off: the resulting photos looks a bit soft, but they have a much more natural look, and with a little of smart sharpen with photoshop you get excellent detail, without artefacts. An interesting thing I noticed is that the sharpening setting influences noise reduction: with the lowest setting the Nokia 5800 applies a moderate, pleasing noise reduction, while with higher sharpening setting it applies a strong, artificial looking noise reduction...one more reason to set the sharpening on the lowest value.

An annoying thing about the 5800 is that every time that you use the camera the parameters are re-setted on the default values, so you have to change them every time. Of course, in the camera setting choose the best JPEG quality, and whenever possible set the ISO sensitivity on the lowest value. It is possible to use self timer, both for including yourself into the photo or to take photos at slow shutter speed without motion blur (of course, in this case the phone must be placed on some kind of support).

In terms of noise, the 5800 delivers quite clean (for a camera phone) images at ISO 100; is it acceptable at ISO 400 and very noisy as ISO 800. Other than that, at ISO 100 you get the best colors, while at higher ISO you lose a lot of color accuracy. Click on the resized photo to download the original.

Full photo, ISO 100 100% crop, ISO 100
Full photo, ISO 400 100% crop, ISO 400
Full photo, ISO 800 100% crop, ISO 800

Photo camera: Nokia 5800 vs Nokia 6120

I have compared the Nokia 5800 with my previous Nokia 6120 (2 megapixels, fixed focus 4.9mm f/3.2 lens). The 5800 has higher resolution, but a slightly smaller sensor. Click on the resized photo to download the original.

Bright light:

Full photo (Nokia 5800)	Full photo (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)

The 5800 has clearly better detail, and a more natural look, with less artefacts. In particular, if you look to the bushes, you can see how well the Nokia 5800 preserve the detail, while the noise reduction of the 6120 creates a green mush without detail. Other than that, the 5800 shows a slightly better dynamic range and more shadow detail.

Low light, without flash:

Full photo (Nokia 5800)	Full photo (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)

The photo taken with the 5800 is a bit more underexposed, but it has clearly more detail, more pleasing colors and less noise.

Low light, with flash:

Full photo (Nokia 5800)	Full photo (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)

There is really no comparison here. Even tough both camera phones have very limited flashes, the flash of Nokia 5800 is twice as big the flash of 6120; the 5800 gives a brighter image with much less noise and more pleasing colors.

Low light, night mode:

Full photo (Nokia 5800)	Full photo (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)

In night mode, both phones select a slow shutter speed. Here the noise difference is more limited, even though the 5800 is still slightly better; other than that, the 5800 shows more detail and better colors.

Macro:

Full photo (Nokia 5800)	Full photo (Nokia 6120)
100% crop (Nokia 5800)	100% crop (Nokia 6120)

There is no comparison. The AF on the 5800 makes a night and day difference: the image is razor sharp, while the photo taken with the 6120 is completely out of focus.

Image quality: video

The Nokia 5800, in spite of the slightly smaller sensor than the 6120, has a way higher resolution (640x480 pixels vs 320x240 pixels) has twice the frame rate (30 FPS vs 15 FPS). On paper you could expect a big improvement, but how does it perform in practice?

Sadly, the video quality of the Nokia 5800 is awful. It is extremely noisy and it shows less detail than other phones with equivalent resolution; as if it wasn't enough, it has many bugs in video mode. The recording seems to work well, but sometimes when you play the video, it gets stuck after 8-10 seconds. It does not happen to all videos, but it happens often. Other than that the white balance is extremely poor, the exposure if often completely wrong, and the brightness often jumps from exaggerately dark to overexposed (my old, cheaper Nokia 6120 was way better). 

Click here to download a zip file with two videos of the same scene; one is recorded with the Nokia 5800, and the other one with the 6120. The video with 5800 shows clearly all the problems I mentioned: after some seconds it gets stucks, then it works again near the end of the recording; the white balance, the exposure and the contrast are absolutely wrong (while the video taken with 6120 looks much better, in spite of the lower resolution).

The Nokia 5800 video quality is even worse than Nokia 6120 video quality, and if you compare it with higher end models, the difference is apalling. I have taken two videos side by side with the 5800 and the N82; these are two stills taken from the videos. 

Still image from video taken with Nokia 5800

Still image from video taken with Nokia N82

The future of camera phones (late 2008 update)

One year ago, I published the article "The Nokia 6120 Camera Phone", where I described my view of the future smartphones. Nowadays, camera phones have reached all the resolution that you may need in a camera phone (5 and 8 megapixels phones are now common); in good light, the crispness and the detail has reached the quality of a good stand-alone digicam. ISO performance still needs to be improved; it would be great to have a camera phone fully usable up to ISO 800!

The lenses uses in camera phones nowadays offer enough resolution to match their 5-8 megapixel sensors, and nearly all lenses used in mid range and high end phones have autofocus; instead, there are still no optical stabilized lenses, nor zoom lenses (except for some very rare 2x or 3x zooms, as the 4.7-12.3mm f/3.3-6.8 lens of the Nokia N93). In future, I hope to see optical image stabilization in camera phones! (and maybe 3x zooms, if the sensor technology improves enough)

I think that a 3x zoom is the best combination between size, versatility and quality, in a camera phone. More powerful zooms would be possible, maybe even in very compact size, but they would be very dark at the tele end (the 3x zoom of the N93 is already f/6.8 at the longest focal, a 5x or 10x zoom would be exaggerately dark). The resulting photos would be soft due to motion blur, or very noisy due to the high ISO settings used to compensate for the small aperture. Other than that, to maintain the compact size with a powerful zoom it would be necessary a small sensor, that means even more noise. A moderate 3x zoom (a 28-80mm equivalent), with image stabilization and 5 megapixel sensor would be perfect!

The video quality has already improved a lot in terms of resolution, even in mid-range phones, and now 640x480px at 30 FPS are quite common (the Samsung M8800 reaches even 740x480px at 30FPS); in a couple of years I expect to see mobile phones with moderate HD video capabilities (1280x720px). That said, the ISO performance during video has not seen big improvements, and in some cases it has even got worse, as in the 5800. I think that mobile phone manufacturers must really focus on improving the low light quality of video, otherwise you get only larger files without any quality improvement.

Such high resolution videos and photos takes a lot of memory space - nowadays we already have 32 GB phones (16 GB internal memory + 16 GB micro SDHC), and I think that in late 2009 that memory will be doubled, and 64 GB smartphones will become quite common.

Of course, here I have talked only about the camera and video aspects, but there will be many more innovations in future smartphones: touchscren will become the standard and more advanced types of touchscreen will be developed; the phones will become even more interactive and customizable...the technology is quickly improving!

Final notes about Nokia 5800

On paper, the Nokia 5800 is a great device; indeed, initially I have truly appreciated it, but with time I have discovered more and more bugs and problems. The awful video quality has not improved even with the latest firmware updates (now I have installed v.20); many 5800 develop a problem with the speacked that led to very poor call quality (and mine is one of the defective ones...); sometimes the touchscreen is not responsive, way worse than iPhone; many applications give installation problems due to signing or firmware bugs; the lack of DivX suppor bothers me a lot.

In conclusion, I wouldn't buy again the Nokia 5800. If I had to choose a phone now, I'd go for the new Samsung i8910 Omnia HD.

Do you have comments or questions?

If you have comments or questions about this article, feel free to ask in the Juza Nature Photography Discussion Forum!