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Nokia C6-01 review: Camera
The Nokia C6-01 eight-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera makes for a very capable image and video capture device, exceeding the capabilities of many of its competitors, including both the Apple iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S with their 5MP cameras.
When you enter the settings screens, you're welcomed with a plethora of configuration options including geo-tagging, face recognition and user-selectable self timer, colour tone, white balance, exposure, light sensitivity (ISO), contrast and sharpness.
Although you have all of these options, you will find that leaving default auto mode settings provides sufficient image quality in most cases.
Be aware, though, that geo-tagging, video stabilisation (video) and face recognition (camera) are not enabled by default. This options list is somewhat shorter than that available on the Nokia C7 and Nokia N8, but will suffice for most circumstances.
The following images were taken on the C6-01 and have had no modification post capture. All EXIF data is still intact.
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AUTO AT MEDIUM RESOLUTION: If you want to take high quality images without taking too much space on the limited memory card then the default settings more than suffice
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LANDSCAPE MODE AT HIGH RESOLUTION: Some may see the colours in this image as a little washed out, but they are honest, providing the true colours from the point of capture
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LANDSCAPE MODE AT HIGH RESOLUTION AND MAXIMUM ZOOM: This picture was taken from the same position as the last one, but with maximum zoom showing a reasonable degree of digital zoom. This is a nice feature, although it only does what cropping the image would do afterwards to some degree
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AUTO AT HIGH RESOLUTION: This image shows the level of contrast you can achieve with the phone in standard mode
Once you've taken your photographs, you can use the pre-installed Photo Editor to rotate, resize, crop, apply manual or automatic red eye reduction and tune (automatic or manual brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, RGB, saturation, sharpness and denoise adjustment) along with adding filter effects (colour styles, arty styles and filter styles).
A nice touch in the effects menus is that you can cycle forward and backwards through the styles (effects) and show a live adjustable split image; top half original, bottom half preview of the style.
Along with these serious image modification options come a number of more fun editing options including clipart, face distortion, framing, drawing, stamping, bubble text and animation.
Some will see the dual-LED flash as a limitation, when compared with Xenon flash devices, but this has provided Nokia with the opportunity to provide users with a flash light during video recording for low light videoing and torch functionality in normal use, where the LEDs are turned on/off with a prolonged slide of the lock/unlock slider - a really nice touch and well thought-out feature.
