The ultimate Nokia camera test: is Pureview really worth it?

Colour

While Nokia's phones do not excel on shooting speed, they are generally very good in terms of colour accuracy. Other lower-end phones in particular often suffer from horrible colour balance. Generally you'll often see reds looking either undersaturated or badly overblown in an attempt to avoid photos looking desaturated.

Click here for the full res shot

We took a picture of a colourful art installation on London's South Bank to see how these cameras deal with displaying several bold shades at once. We're impressed.

Click here for the full res shot

While the lower-end phones tend to show a good deal more variance between shots in terms of colour and white balance, in our test shots colour balance is remarkably natural and consistent. The Lumia 530 reds get a little close to toxic levels, but otherwise saturations are fairly even across the board.

For a second test, we took a picture of some beach huts at the seaside – these have more gradual tones, offering a different kind of challenge.

Click here for the full res shot

The Lumia 635 is a little cooler in tone than the others, and the overall warm tint of the Lumia 530 means colours are slightly less well defined on the low-end contender.

But the consistency here is impressive – other manufacturer's lower-end phones often bring horrible colour reproduction to the party. We'd ideally like to see the Lumia 635 warm up a bit, though.

Depth of Field

Depth of field effects have become trendy in the last 12 months. It's where the background (or foreground) is blurred-out. Phones like the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5 offer modes to let you 'fake' this effect.

The real deal is a function of lens and camera sensor. The bokeh (that's the character of the blurriness) depends largely on the lens, but the extent of it is also determined by the size of the sensor, due to the camera's crop factor.

If that sounds too techy, just look at the demo to see what we mean. The larger sensors of the Lumia 1020 and Lumia 930 are much more capable of producing a nice blurred-out effect than the smaller-sensor Lumia 635.

Click here for the full res shot

Click here for the full res shot

Click here for the full res shot

The Lumia 1020 is the clear winner here though. It offers the most pronounced, smoothest, blurring effect, and its warm colours really work wonders on this scene. The phone also offers the shallowest depth of field – the area which is in focus. It may sound like a bad thing, but it's really not.

Click here for the full res shot

Unfortunately the Lumia 530 totally fails this test as it does not offer autofocus. Its lens has a fixed focus, meaning it can't actually focus on something specifically. This also rules-out being able to take close-ups, which should make the macro test coming up a bit interesting.

Macro

Macro photography: it's all about making your subject appear larger than life by getting really up-close with it and revealing details you just wouldn't see or notice with the naked eye. The two key factors to a good mobile macro photo are being able to get nice and close to the subject and having good fine detail and decent colour reproduction.

There's only one winner here: it's the Nokia Lumia 930. While the Nokia Lumia 1020 can produce the best photos out of all these cameras, its minimum focus distance is quite poor. You just can't get all that close-up.

Click here for the full res shot

To explain the demo: we tried to get as close to the leaf as possible while keeping it in focus. Ignore whether the attached berries are in focus or not as what we're trying to do here is to render the fine little 'hairs' on the leaf you'd never normally notice.

Click here for the full res shot

We also see here that the Lumia 1020 can tend to make its colours look a little larger-than-life than is strictly accurate. In the demo, the leaf is just that bit too green.

Click here for the full res shot

The Lumia 930 shot is lovely, with natural colour and loads of detail. While the Lumia 1020 manages to hold onto a fair amount of detail thanks to its super-high-res sensor, it'd do even better if it was able to get closer-up.

Click here for the full res shot

For its price, the Lumia 635 does very well here. The colours aren't as sophisticated as the Lumia 930's, but it has managed to pick out those little hairs.

Click here for the full res shot

Thanks to the lack of autofocus, the Lumia 530's attempt is a bust. You can't get remotely close to the leaf, ruining our chances of seeing the fine detail we're after.