Nokia Lumia 620 review

There's a new baby in the Lumia family

Nokia Lumia 620 review
"The most fun for your money" - apparently

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Camera

The Nokia Lumia 620 comes with a 5 megapixel camera. That's in line with other phones in this sort of price range, such as the HTC Windows Phone 8S and the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2, so it's bang on what we expected in that sense.

There are a respectable number of settings that you can customise to your liking, with exposure, ISO and white balance all adjustable. There's also a flash, autofocus, and a few scene modes such as 'Night' and 'Close-up'.

Nokia Lumia 620 review

As with other Windows Phone 8 handsets, there's also a selection of 'lenses'. These can do any number of things really, from QR scanners, to AR overlays, but most of them need to be downloaded from the app store.

You also get a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera, and thanks to the dedicated camera button that all Windows Phone handsets rock, taking pictures is a breeze.

That said, with just 5 megapixels to play with on the main camera, the quality isn't great enough to threaten your compact camera. But considering the price of the handset, its photo-taking capabilities aren't bad at all.

Nokia Lumia 620 review

The Nokia Lumia 620 handles landscapes quite well, though details are a little muddy.

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

Indoor photos without flash come out slightly noisy and indistinct.

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

Flash brightens the image a little, but does nothing for the noise.

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

Even with night mode on, night time shots are very dark and very noisy.

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

Close-ups come out quite well; pictures are quite sharp and display a reasonable amount of detail.

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

With sports mode on, traffic moving at roughly 30mph displays some blurring - but not much.

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Video

The video camera on the Nokia Lumia 620 is rather more limited than the stills camera. Capable of shooting in 720p it, like the photo camera, is pretty typical of a phone in this price range.

However, there are rather fewer options to play with when recording videos than when taking photos. You can change the white balance, the video quality, set whether to have the lamp on or off and whether or not to enable continuous focus, but there aren't any scene modes.

Options aside, the results when shooting video are reasonably decent, and while they don't particularly stand out, they are easily comparable to 720p footage shot on many other phones.

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.