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Nokia E7 review: Camera
The camera boasts a decent eight-megapixel camera with dual LED flash that handily beats the HTC Desire S's paltry five megapixels, but doesn't match up to the Nokia N8's 12MP. Although it's easy to open using the soft camera shortcut key built into the case, the UI is ultimately disappointing – it's too fiddly, with not enough preset modes, and those that are there are time consuming to get to.
The dedicated key is a nice touch, making it easy to open the camera, but it does take a few precious seconds to load. The soft key makes it far easier to take actual pictures and video, though, a bonus that iPhone and HTC Incredible S users may envy.
There's tap-to-zoom but no autofocus, though there is face recognition software and the scene modes available include portrait, landscape, night and night portrait. Fairly limited choice, we would say… not a macro mode in sight. You're not exactly going to become the next Bailey or Attenborough with this handset.
If you're a dab hand with cameras in the first place, you can play (to some extent) with the white balance, ISO, exposure and so on, but most choices are preset and, given that you can't change the shutter speed, messing around with them only gives you marginally better photos.
The LED flash is surprisingly powerful; so much so that there's a chance we may have half-blinded a small Australian singer. Oops.
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OUDOORS: In direct sunlight and automatic capture mode, the colour is sucked out of the picture almost completely
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CLOUDY: In cloudier conditions and auto mode, the quality is much better with the images retaining a true-to-life colouring
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INDOORS: Indoors in night mode is where the camera really shines. Taken during a gig, the quality and colour of this picture is excellent
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EFFECTS: There are colour modes for editing. This is the above picture in black and white, which works really well and looks, if possible, even sharper than the colour version
There is the choice to upload to Twitter or Facebook. It also uploads photos in such a ninja-ery way that it's loaded before you can caption or generally add any explanation to the image that's about to land on your Facebook wall.
