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The Nokia C6 features a 5MP camera with an LED flash, and an impressive number of settings.
Considering how little focus is made of the camera on this phone, it's certainly not wanting for options. There are numerous scene modes, including Close-up (macro), Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night, Night Portrait and User defined (manual).
There's a Colour tone setting, that enables you to go Sepia or Black and White, as well as an option for Vivid colours.
White balance, exposure, ISO levels, contrast and sharpness can all be adjusted, too. There's a Sequence shooting mode and grid overlay for getting your Rule of Thirds composure correct.
Not all of these carry across to Video mode, but there's still the option to adjust the white balance and colour tone. The flash is also available as a steady light when shooting video.
Video records in VGA resolution at 30 frames per second, in MP4 format as standard or 3GP for sending via MMS.
There's a 4x digital zoom that's available in both still and video mode, and can be adjusted on the fly while taking video. The flash has a red-eye reduction mode, and can be turned off.
We were generally very impressed by the options and usability of the camera, but there's one significant flaw. When holding the phone up landscape, like a camera, and using the shutter button, the screen wobble comes right back into play.
You're generally holding tightest with your thumbs on the front of the phone at that point, which means pressing down on the shutter causes the rear to slide out a bit before you get the shutter button all the way down.
In bright light, it's not such a problem, but in any other condition it can introduce blur and double images. It's such a silly design mistake, but every time it happens it'll annoy the hell out of you.
There is a button on-screen for taking images, but because it's a resistive touchscreen, you have to press quite hard to choose it, which gives you the exact problem of the phone then shaking slightly as you take the image.
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LANDSCAPE MODE: Using the automatic Landscape mode settings, the sky has come out fairly overexposed here. The colours are quite accurate, but viewing this at full size reveal a criminal lack of detail in any part of the picture, really
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VIVID COLOURS: Another shot with the same settings, except for the fact that the Vivid colour setting has been added. It gives the trees a nice, lush look on an overcast day, perhaps more appealing than the natural version. The sky looks a little less overexposed, but it could just be the altered colours playing tricks
CONTRAST: Taken against a blue sky, the camera can't find any middle ground in the metering, so anything near the foreground loses all detail and colour
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PORTRAIT: The camera is totally incapable of handling the sunlight bouncing on this lion's head in Portrait mode. We tried to get this shot several times, and this was the best of them. It's a shame, because the background is nice and blurred, as it should be, and if you look at the lion's art at full size, there's actually a ton of detail there. It'd be really impressive, if the camera could handle the rest of the shot
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ZOOM: With the 4x digital zoomed maxed out, this pigeon lacks any texture or definition
CLOSE-UP: This is more like it. Vibrant natural colours, crisp shadows and highlights that don't lose any detail, texture and dimension… we couldn't be happier with this macro shot. Pity the camera didn't perform like this all the time
Though the C6 ostensibly records video in VGA resolution, it outputs 16:9 footage, which doesn't match up. VGA is 640 x 480, which is 4:3, so obviously something's got to give here.
After checking on a computer, it's actually the vertical resolution that loses out. Videos on the C6 record at 640 x 352 at 30 frames per second. This puts them pretty close to native resolution for the 640 x 360 nHD screen.
The actual quality was pretty disappointing. The most noticeable issue is that the exposure and white balance seemed to keep changing on the fly, even when we were standing in one spot.
In the video above, you'll notice things get suddenly lighter and darker, and the colours are sometimes warmer than others.
Motion is captured smoothly, as you can see in the ripples on the pond, which is what we'd expect at 30fps.
Sadly, detail is lacking, as is definition in anything out of direct sunlight. Really, it's good for a quick shot of your mate falling from a tree, but there's not much to recommend the video capabilities of the C6 for.
