First off, congratulations to Nokia’s Chanse Arrington who’s Head of Developer & Content Marketing at the company. He was just married and while the addition of a wife to his life must be fulfilling, we’re focused on that Lumia 920.
The picture above is taken with the 920 as posted to his public SkyDrive account (he Tweeted the image yesterday). The picture is obviously very low light though a flash is used this case to brighten the scene.
Flash photography is a finicky subject. A lot of us shoot “natural”, which means big heavy lenses and only on available light. But sometimes you have to use a flash for certain situations. One thing though pros never do is use the “on board” flash—it’s like sacrilege. That’s why they always have giant flash contraptions with diffusers and such to give a much better photo.
Cropped image from the full resolution photo
Here on the Lumia 920 though, no such option exists so we must make do. The issue with the flash is it’s not really controlled by the user and it often over-exposes the image if too close and under-exposes if too far. Results often include uneven lighting and an odd photo. Sure, you got the image but it’s not pretty.
Our initial interpretation of this one, single shot is it’s pretty great for a camera phone. The exposure is not to high anywhere, especially on the whites—it’s not perfect but for a bright flash going off close to two faces, it’s more than acceptable. Color is also maintained quite well, keeping some punch to the saturation. Sharpness is also good though obviously when you zoom on a high-resolution computer, you can see it lose some of its edge. But for posting on the web, Facebook, email or SMS it’s a great looking photo.
Of course there is some red-eye there, which is unfortunate but if you ran through Thumba on your phone you should be able to quickly fix that. We also don’t know if any auto-fix feature as applied to the photo, but it looks like not. Some people have remarked about the grain of the photo, but from our experience we find it more than acceptable. Plus with no direct comparison to another phone, it's really hard to judge.
We can’t wait to get the 920 in our hands to really put it through some test, but right now we’re feeling quite excited about its prospects. This one photo is merely anecdotal but it's still fun to observe.
You can see the full resolution of the photo here.
Via Reddit.
Daniel Rubino is the Executive Editor of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft here since 2007, back when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, Microsoft Surface, laptops, next-gen computing, and arguing with people on the internet.
