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The Nokia C3's camera shoots at a mere 2MP, and is another area where the relatively low cost of this handset is immediately apparent.
There are almost no settings to play with. You can fiddle with effects choosing between greyscale, sepia, negative and normal, and choose between four white balance settings: automatic, daylight, incandescent, fluorescent.
It has quite a slow shutter speed, so you'll have to hold the camera steady to get non-shaky shots of your subject. The time lag between clicking the centre of the D-pad to shoot and your photo being taken is mercifully short but you'll still need a steady hand, and if you want to photograph moving subjects you could be in trouble.
It is very, very much basic stuff, and the video camera is no better, shooting to just two resolutions of 320 x 240 and 176 x 144, either with or without sound.
The default setting for video length, incidentally, is for MMS messages, so your first capture may cut off disappointingly early – as ours did!
It is easy to change the setting to the maximum length your memory medium can support, though.
CRUSHED WHITES: The sun was bright on the day we took this photo, and the camera really struggled to balance its colours. It decided the trees were most important, and so the building right of shot is a photographic disaster.
DETAIL: There is a lack of definition in this fairly close-up photo of flowers, but the colour is pretty close to what it should be and the focus is reasonable unless you look at the top-left edge of the picture, which for some reason is all squiffy.
MID-RANGE: With mid-distance shots, the camera copes reasonably well, and the quality of the detail here is more impressive than we'd anticipated.
LACK OF VIBRANCY: The camera has done the right thing here by focussing on the playground apparatus rather than the fence in the front of the photo, but the image itself is not particularly vibrant. Another victim of a sunny day!
For its low-resolution, video shooting was surprisingly good. The camera compensates for changes in light pretty well – and except when it was pointing directly at the sun it did a passable job.
