Nokia N97 review

On the outside, the camera looks decent if unspectacular, with another Carl Zeiss lens (and a pretty spiffy dual LED flash) beneath a slide-out screen to protect the snapper and also start the camera (in a similar vein to the Sony Ericsson C905) although as you can see from the pictures below, this still quickly filled up with dust and fluff.

The interface on the camera looks like it's simple with very little functionality, but once you press the menu button a whole host of options present themselves to you.

Users can change almost all settings, from ISO to exposure as well as having a grid placed on top to take better snaps which gave a nice camera-rich experience.

The video camera is a little bit more bog standard, but thanks to the 32GB of internal memory you can record nearly two hours of DVD-like footage from the handset.

Why you'd want to is beyond us, as for that long you'd probably just buy a camcorder, but we never like to turn down options here on TechRadar.

Here's how the Nokia N97 fared against an Olympus SP-565UZ camera in our like-for-like picture test:

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The Olympus obviously performs much better than the N97 thanks to being a higher end, dedicated camera, but the N97 still fares well in overcast longer shots.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

With a bright background, the N97 manages to maintain macro focus while keeping the background roughly in shot. However, it's powerless to prevent the light bleeding through, while the Olympus manages to keep things sharp and colours vivid.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The difference between the two cameras here is both startling and captures the essence of how a cameraphone differs from a dedicated snapper.

The fire and scene is much easier to see with the N97, but the Olympus is much more the device you want when you're trying to 'properly' photograph a fire scene with wildly varying brightness levels.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

In perhaps the most stark contrast between the two devices, the Nokia N97 cannot even come close to matching the Olympus for clarity, sharpness and detail, instead letting the minimal light 'wash-out' the whole picture.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

Night imaging, despite using a dual LED flash, is never going to beat a decent Xenon effort as clearly shown here. Colour reproduction and scene light equality is of varying quality for the Nokia N97, but is clear as day with the Olympus.