Low light shots - Did I get a lemon?

[albertph]

I've been waiting for Lumia 920 since forever (not really), and now that I have it, I'm really disappointed with the low light shots. Is it just my unit?

Test picture 1: All auto https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=80e2...A89C2D3AFD!156&sff=1&authkey=!AI-FuVfEyhndTpk

Test picture 2: All auto except night mode https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=80e2...A89C2D3AFD!157&sff=1&authkey=!AP2H74h2_NHxaKQ

Test picture 3: All auto except night portrait mode (wtf is the difference between night and night portrait) https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=80e2...A89C2D3AFD!158&sff=1&authkey=!AJ7zIeZzPB5EWpg

Let me know if you can't see the pics, I'm pretty noob with skydrive. Also, I could've gotten the night and night portrait mixed up but you can see the details of the shot in there.

I've been looking at WPC since around September or October, and I've seen all kinds of pictures from you guys since then, so I pretty much have an idea on how the pictures should look like in low light conditions, and these pictures are definitely not how it should look like.

 

[au_xtr3me]

Re: Did I get a lemon?

Try manually setting the ISO to 400 or above and see how you go. Sometimes the light metering misjudges the scene lighting when there are lights present (likely your house lights)

 

[albertph]

Re: Did I get a lemon?

Ok I'll try that with combinations of auto, night, iso 400 and iso 800... I know that these can be adjusted and I'm probably just being lazy, but I'm jealous with all the other low light shots in auto :s

 

[congusano]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with your phone. With the pictures above, that is a very hard picture to correctly expose, with a very bright area (windows) and almost pitch black surrounding areas.

Your camera has to choose which exposure to go by, and often times it will expose on the side of light, not dark. That being said, it sees the bright windows and calculates that it doesn't need a very long exposure, because it is a bright scene.


Want to test your low light capabilities. Take a picture in a dimly lit room without any single point of bright light.

 

[albertph]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with your phone. With the pictures above, that is a very hard picture to correctly expose, with a very bright area (windows) and almost pitch black surrounding areas.

Your camera has to choose which exposure to go by, and often times it will expose on the side of light, not dark. That being said, it sees the bright windows and calculates that it doesn't need a very long exposure, because it is a bright scene.


Want to test your low light capabilities. Take a picture in a dimly lit room without any single point of bright light.

Thanks man, I'll try that too (I'm eating right now lol)

Any of you guys have other suggestions?

 

[ttsoldier]

You need to actually have some sort of light to get a low light shot.

Your surroundings look plain ole dark. It's a LOW LIGHT shot. Not a PITCH BLACK shot.

 

[albertph]

There's actually a street lamp some 2-3 meters away, it's yellow though so maybe it's not enough...

Anyway I did what au_xtr3me suggested and I got better results (still uploading). I guess I expected too much of auto settings