3555 Takes Better Photos than N82 - only in VGA

I was out and curious at how good the 3555's VGA (640x480 pixels) camera is compared to the N82 in VGA and was very shocked with the results.

I kept both 3555 and N82 in AUTO mode without fiddling with any settings after opening the lens cover.

Outdoor photos:




The 3555 is on top and the N82 is below. You can see the N82 employs a lot of noise reduction throughout downsampling of the photo. The N82 ends up making the sky blocky and loses a lot of the details in the trees compared to the 3555.

Original Photos

3555:


N82:


Indoor photos:
I did turn off flash on the N82 but that was it. Same AUTO settings as above.




The 3555 is on top and the N82 is below. This one is a lot less clear which phone is taking the 'better' photo but the 3555 is showing a reasonable amount of noise on the left while the N82 just blurs it all together. You can see the shadow on the left turn into a bunch of blocks on the N82.

Original Photos

3555:


N82:


I personally prefer the VGA photos coming from the 3555 but it's likely the algorithms on the N82 were designed with higher pixel photos in mind like those at 5MP. Of course the N82 beats out the 3555 with any higher resolution. Another thing to note is the 3555 generated larger files than the N82 for both photos. I think this is a good reason Nokia should allow users to turn on/off the post processing algorithms and give us control to the JPEG compression settings.

Update: After looking at it further, it seems it only happens for lower resolution photos so higher resolution ones like those taken at 5MP are not affected:



Original:


Seems like it's a problem with just taking VGA photos. There's something odd happening in the downsampling algorthim. I guess it's not a big problem as people rarely will use this setting and just take photos at the highest resolution and resize in an image editor.