Nokia 920 Camera Zoom Very Bad?

[kittshelby]

One of my coworkers played with my Nokia 920 cause he was thinking of getting one. He seemed impressed by everything about the phone except the camera. He commented saying why is the zoom so bad. He took a picture after zooming and I have to agree it was pretty blurry. (we were indoors with flourescent lighting by the way). He then used his Galaxy S3 to take the same photo with zoom and it was much clearer and sharper. He commented saying there must be something wrong with my phone or camera settings because he heard it was suppose to have the best camera on a phone right now. He mentioned seeing the photo comparasions between iPhone, 920, and S3 and that it showed the 920 pictures were the best. He seemed disappointed and then said that he's going to wait till that problem is fixed before he's going to consider buying one.

And I was kind of embarrassed, and shocked as well since I rarely use the camera so that's not a big deal to me. But too also thought the 920 was suppose to have the best camera on a phone. Does anyone know why the picture is so blurry after zooming in with the 920 and how to fix it? Just in case someone tests out my 920; cause I've been getting a lot of people requesting to try out my phone.

PS: My camera settings are the default settings.

 

[pjeung]

did you try the "close-up" option on photo settings? No need to half click for a focus either when it's zoomed in.. looks pretty good to me..

 

[kittshelby]

did you try the "close-up" option on photo settings? No need to half click for a focus either when it's zoomed in.. looks pretty good to me..

But it was not a close up shot. He was taking a photo of an object about 10 feet away and he zoomed in on the object. There was text on the object and they looked too blurry to read when taking the picture after zooming in all the way whereas his S3 the text was still legible.

 

[VagrantWade]

There is a reason they have magnetic lens attachments. Zooming will always suck on phones because they have tiny lenses.

 

[pjeung]

But it was not a close up shot. He was taking a photo of an object about 10 feet away and he zoomed in on the object. There was text on the object and they looked too blurry to read when taking the picture after zooming in all the way whereas his S3 the text was still legible.

actually i take that back, half clicking for focus on close up shots looks crazy good..that's specifically for physically being close to an object, not zooming in with camera, my bad.. i tried experimenting with zooming in and taking pics on default, and as long as i stabilized the shot by half clicking the camera button before taking the shot, i could see text pretty clearly

 

[weis]

You probably already know that there is actually no physical "zoom" in this kind of phone camera? It's a fixed lens camera and when you "zoom" it just crop the middle part of the photo and enlarge it to e.g. 8mp. All of the camera phone do so except Nokia's 808 Pureview which uses different mechanism ( well it has a 40mp sensor so it can afford to crop without lossing the quality of the photos).

I don't have S3 so I can't say why one photo is better over the other. One possibility is that your friend didn't zoom totally equally with the two camera. You know with that kind of "finger zoom" you might get one photo with 3x digital zoom and the other with 4x, of course the 4x zoom photo looks worse because it's enlarged to 8mp with a smaller potion of the original photo...

 

[Ken Peffley]

hello, i my be dumb here but where is the zoom on the camera for pictures and video>?? thanks

 

[conanheath]

hello, i my be dumb here but where is the zoom on the camera for pictures and video>?? thanks

You can pinch to zoom pics and video.

 

[KoukiFC3S]

The 920's software has a pretty aggressive noise reduction compared to the competition. This destroys the finer details, which is why you cannot read the text when you zoom in.

 

[vlad0]

There is a reason they have magnetic lens attachments. Zooming will always suck on phones because they have tiny lenses.

There are two exceptions to that rule

N8 3x lossless zoom @ 720p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXksDrgB1nA

808 4x lossless zoom @ 1080p

808 @ AT&T park - YouTube

Both have no movable parts, they use the full size of their sensors and crop out of that.. its a very elegant system if the phone can handle the processing. Most phones don't use their full sensors for video..