Nokia Lumia 710 Review - T-Mobile's Nokia WP7
by Brian Klug on January 5, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- Mobile
- WP7
- Lumia 710
Camera - Stills and Video
The 710 uses a completely new F/2.4 optical system for Nokia in conjunction with a 5 MP CMOS and rear facing single LED flash. The system has a wide 35mm equivalent focal length of 28mm (and thus the same field of view as the Lumia 800), though it doesn’t carry Carl Zeiss branding.
Camera OSD controls inside WP7 are almost exactly the same as the Lumia 800, which now save and remain persistent across shooting sessions. Those controls are: scenes, white balance, exposure value, ISO, metering mode, effects, contrast, saturation, focus mode, resolution, and flicker reduction. Just like the 800 the 710 offers you the ability to shoot in either 4:3 or 16:9, but doesn’t have the neat ability to accomplish this by not just chopping pixels off the top and bottom. Instead, the 710 shoots at either 5 MP 2592x1944 (4:3) or 4 MP 2592x1458 (16:9) which is really more like 3.7 MP.
The 710, like every Windows Phone, has a two step camera button, but as I mentioned earlier I found the first detent extremely difficult to locate when pressed. I’m not sure whether this is just a manufacturing errata affecting just my device, or something that will be present on every 710. This does makes shooting difficult since WP7 will capture immediately when the button is pressed all the way down - even if the AF routine isn’t finished. Alternatively you can tap to focus (and capture) which is how I ended up getting most of my camera samples done.
To evaluate the Lumia 710’s camera, we turned to our lightbox tests with the lights on and off, outdoor testing at our test locations, and the new semi-revamped camera tests with the ISO12233, distortion, and color checker charts.
In the lightbox test with the lights on, the camera seems to have some issues (just like the Lumia 800) with white balance, producing an image with a definitely reddish cast. Something about the lights in the lightbox and Qualcomm’s ISP on the MSM8x55 generation of SoC definitely doesn’t get along, since I’ve now seen this behavior across HTC and Nokia devices. I don’t think it’s a fault of WP7 or Nokia after seeing this another time. Sharpness however is good, though I still feel that JPEG compression is turned up too high. For a 5 MP camera however, the 710 doesn’t look bad at all (jot that down as another tick under the 'megapixels don’t matter' column). With the lights turned off, we can see the differences between the white balance (which looks much better here) with the lights on. WP7 nicely fires a pre flash and illuminates the scene while focusing so we don’t miss focus even in the dark, and as a result we get a nice sharp image. The Lumia 710’s flash doesn’t have a super wide angle however, so there’s some falloff at the top and edges.
Turning to the new test bench, we can see some other good behavior out of the 710 camera which isn’t surprising. The white balance on the color checker card is actually not bad, though the colors themselves are a tad undersaturated. The 710 has a bit of barrel distortion (but so does every other smartphone camera) and actually comes out looking pretty good. Having only 5 MP to work with, we obviously see fewer spatial frequencies make it through to the picture in the ISO12233 chart - I can read up to around 12.5 in the saggital and tangential. You can also see that the 710 doesn’t do any insane oversharpening (no halos) here as well.
Next up are the outdoor tests at our smartphone test locations. As a reminder, tests 1 and 2 are no longer available, though 3 through 7 continue to get the job done. Subjectively I think the 710 comes out looking excellent here, with great dynamic range, contrast, and nice and sharp results. Again, my only complaint is that using the physical camera button produced some images where the 710 totally missed focus due to me not being able to tell where the focus detent was at all.
Video
Just like the Lumia 800, the 710 shoots 720p30 H.264 Baseline video at 14.0 Mbps. Audio is stereo AAC at 48 kHz 48 Kbps as well.
The 710 defaults to shooting 720p30 and not VGA, which is excellent. Curiously, the OSD sets the flicker compensation to 50 Hz for a model shipping on T-Mobile, in the US, where our power (and thus flicker from electric lights) is 60 Hz. We do our sample video shooting outdoors however, so this isn’t a huge concern.
Like the other Lumia, I think that the 710 ends up creating excellent quality 720p video. At this point, none of the Windows Phones are shooting 1080p video purely because none of the approved SoCs can encode 1080p video, so you can’t really hold that against the 710. I’ve also done the usual thing and uploaded the video to our own servers (88.6 MB) for you take a look at without any of YouTube’s transcoding.
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french toast - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
We really need some exciting hardware and up to date specs..i love the look of wp7 but i REFUSE to be palmed off with 18month out of date hardware, when i can get something 5x as powerfull for the same price.Yes i have read all the countless arguements about wp7 being 'processor friendly' and being optimised for the user experience..good for them.
But it seems that they have used that rather good selling point to skimp away from the expense of decent screens, features, and processing power.
Yes it does run better than buggy android and caparitivly crap hardware..fantastic but it would run a bit more smoother, have better battery life, and would enable some apps and games that are worthy to hold that xbox moniker..at the moment all i see is crappy indie ports...i was expecting something MUCH better than this.
Still, im a massive fan of nokia, and i love my xbox 360..so my hope is that microkia get there act togther and release something worth buying..
a5cent - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
I understand not wanting to pay the same price for inferior hardware... who would?However, it's currently a fact that you can only have ONE of the following:
a) A restrictive hardware policy, enabling MS to push all their updates to all WP7 owners in a timely fashion
b) A flexible hardware policy, that allows manufacturers to arbitrarily improve their devices, enabling the WP7 platform compete with android in terms of hardware specs.
Microsoft has chosen (a). I think 90% of a smartphone's value is delivered by the software. Considering that the overwhelming majority of people don't want to bother with rooting their devices and flashing ROMs, I agree with MS that (a) is the right position to take.
As a result, the WP community will always go through long stretches were their hardware is inferior to the best Android deice. With WP8 we will get our short moment in the hardware lime-lite, only to fall behind again shortly thereafter. Going with WP means we accept this and get over it.
At some point the advances in smartphone technology will slow, and even before that many will realize the hardware is only a means-to-an-end. They will realize timely software updates are much more important... and wonder how we could ever like a system like android, that evolves so slowly and only gets one update every year or so.
PubFiction - Sunday, January 8, 2012 - link
Yep it is this and lack of choice. Sprint only has a single WP7 device and it lost my dollar because the screen was lower resolution and it was a slower device than the Evo 3D which I picked.Also when all your phones never come out on top in benchmarks no one is going to be interested.
Wolfpup - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
I wish they'd devote 2-4x the bandwidth at least so calls actually sounded decent.binqq - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
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burntham77 - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
These are neat phones, but I still have not found a WP7 phone that could replace my Android phone and Zune. Someday, perhaps. Someday.jnemesh - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
" if in two years we don't live in a world where there is mindblowing integration between my Windows PC, my Xbox 360 and my Windows Phone - then the platform deserves to fail. Microsoft will have squandered its biggest advantage. "Two years? Wow...that is overly generous! That would mean 3 1/2 years from introduction to mainstream success, swimming upstream against Apple and Google! I think its worse than that. If we dont see SOME measure of success from THIS generation of Nokia WP7 handsets, including the 710, the 800 and the "flagship" 900, they are sunk! They have been trolling around 1 to 2 percent market share, and FALLING. So if they dont get it together quickly, they will NEVER gain the momentum necessary to even remain a player! Hell, even Palm managed 5% at their height, and the only way Microsoft can report those numbers is when they lump in legacy Windows Mobile phones with them!
Personally, I feel that the phone UI is hideous, and the functionality of the phone is SERIOUSLY lacking in comparison to their Android counterparts. If I want "tiles", I can put them on my Android handset...but if I want to do anything outside of what Microsoft wants their users to do with WP7, I am out of luck! Too limited, too outdated, and too ugly to live! Better luck next time, guys...the Kin2 aint happening!
Timz - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
You can benchmark the camera's color reproduction simply by checking them with deltae; http://delt.ae/ , its a 100% free tool for color checker (amongst other stuff) evaluation.