Smartphones have more or less replaced the space that was once occupied by a nifty point and shoot or a companion cameras. Usually the photography arsenal today, consists of a DSLR and a mobile camera for quick shots. As a result, camera has become a major differentiator when deciding to pick up a smartphone.
When Nokia announced the Lumia 630, one quick glance and you could see, camera was one place where they decided to majorly implement cost cutting. Unlike every Nokia Lumia device released thus far, the Lumia 630 lacks a physical shutter button, clearly indicating that this is not a device, with camera as its USP. Dive deeper and you see that Nokia has in fact degraded the camera setup from the Lumia 625, the device, whose successor the Lumia 630 is. Surprisingly, there is no flash or front facing camera in the Lumia 630, both of which were very much a part of the Lumia 625. Add to the fact, that Nokia recently announced the Nokia X2, with both, an LED flash and front facing camera in a similar price bracket, and you really start wondering about the sanity of the decision.
Specifications and Shots
As a result, we were very interested to see how the camera of the Lumia 630 performs. On the specs front, the camera is a 5 MP unit and features a 1/4 inch sensor with a 28 mm lens. The camera is able to shoot videos in 720 P at 30 fps. However, the diminutive specifications meant that the camera, while able to take decent shots in brightly lit scenes, really struggled in any other situation. We took a plethora of shots, 15 of which we are attaching to give you an idea of how the camera performs in various lighting conditions. You will notice that in dimly lit conditions, things are just plain not usable, while even in reasonably challenging mid lit conditions, the camera produces an odd blue or red tinge to the picture, depending upon the scene. You can click on the samples attached below to see the pictures in full resolution. Here are the Nokia Lumia 630 performance samples:
All the shots above are taken in auto mode in the Nokia Pro Cam application. The app does give you a ton of features like the ability to control the ISO, White Balance, Focus as well as the shutter speed. You can use several of Nokia’s lenses, from which defocus is probably the most useful. Lumia 630, also has bracketing which is basically a manual HDR mode, where you set the exposure range and the number of images the camera will take. We were really annoyed by how long the camera app took to fire up, in some cases as much as up to 4 seconds which sometimes meant missing out on the scene completely. Launching the camera immediately from lock screen was also an issue, though we did add the camera icon in the action center to get around that.
Conclusion
Overall, as you can see from the sample shots, the Nokia lumia 630 camera performances are borderline average. The color reproduction is very decent in brightly lit conditions but goes for a toss in dim or mid lights. The camera really struggles in low light to capture anything mildly usable. The images are not overly saturated, though the device does try to post process images taken in dark conditions to compensate the lack of flash. You can capture a perfectly good shot provided you know your ways around basic photography like when to play with the ISO settings or the white balance but a distinct lack of details is bound to put you off. If you are a lot into capturing pictures from your mobile device, we would seriously advice you to think twice before picking up the Lumia 630 as it would not cater to your needs in the long run.
