Nokia Lumia 900 Review - Windows Phone with LTE
by Brian Klug on April 3, 2012 9:00 PM ESTCamera Analysis
Camera quality has almost always been Nokia’s strongest suite, and the Lumia 900 isn’t an exception. The device builds on the Lumia 800 by including the same 8 MP rear facing camera module with 28mm effective focal length (in 35mm ‘units’), F/2.2 aperture, Carl Zeiss branding, and built around a 5 plastic element optical system. Like a number of other new Nokia phones, the Lumia 900 also includes a 4:3 and 16:9 option with unique horizontal field of views for both. Switch into the 16:9 mode and you get a wider field of view which uses the full horizontal extent of the sensor at 7 MP (resolution), or use 4:3 mode at 8 MP (resolution) and use the full height of the sensor. For example, I've uploaded a photo of the same scene taken in roughly the same position with both 7MP (16:9) and 8MP (4:3) for your perusal.
Where the Lumia 900 builds on the Lumia 800 is inclusion of a 1280x720 (1 MP) front facing camera for video calling.
Like other Windows Phones with front facing cameras, the primary camera application can switch between the front and rear camera for shooting photos and videos, but on the front facing camera settings go away. The rear facing camera still includes all the settings options that I’ve seen on previous Lumias - recall that this is one of the Windows Phone menus that does change between vendors depending on their camera emphasis.
To tackle image quality, we've turned to our standard image testing suite which consists of photographs taken at five locations in our test bench (3-7), our lightbox tests with the lights on, and lights off, and photos of an ISO12233 chart, a GMB color checker card, and finally a distortion chart. I've also taken miscellaneous photos during my limited time with the Lumia 900 which I've put in a gallery below.
The Lumia 900 ends up performing very close to the 800 (unsurprisingly) and has great optical quality. In the distortion chart there's limited distortion, and in the test bench photos things end up nice and sharp pretty much everywhere. It goes without saying that obviously Nokia continues to have a dominant position in the smartphone camera space, even when it isn't building phones around the camera like with the N8 or PureVision 808.
Where the Lumia 900 does seem to struggle is white balance, as pretty much all the Lumias have weird color rendering in the lightbox test with lights on, creating a strange washed out cast. I would wager that this is more an outcome of the older ISP onboard MSM8x55/APQ8055 than anything else, and it's entirely possible that things will get better in later updates as Nokia continues to mess around with the sliders on Qualcomm's ISP. In addition, the preview image sometimes contains the colored center dot chromatic aberration we've seen on other phones, though the lens shading ISP does seem to fix it when you look at the actual captured images. As an aside, this is really another area where eventually moving to dual core SoCs will make a difference - the successors to 8x55 have better ISP.
Video quality on the Lumia 900 is very good. Video on the rear camera is encoded at 14 Mbps 1280x720 at 30 FPS in H.264 baseline with CABAC and 1 reference frame, as opposed to the CAVLC I’ve seen on a number of other devices. This is also a pretty high bitrate for 720p, and the result is subjectively very good quality. Note that none of the Windows Phones can record 1080p yet due to the devices all using single core Snapdragons whose encoder only can handle H.264 at 720p or below. Eventually we’ll see 1080p as Windows Phone adopts dual core SoCs with the rumored Apollo update which include 1080p encoders that will even encode high profile video. Audio on the rear camera is stereo AAC at 86 kbps with 48 kHz sampling, it’s good to see the Lumia 900 doing stereo audio using those two microphones onboard.
Front facing video is 1.5 Mbps VGA at 30FPS with the same audio quality. One thing I did notice about the front facing video is that it doesn’t seem to obey the rotation or orientation. Even if the camera UI is rotated properly, video shot on the front facing camera is always portrait orientation (480 x 640). This is pretty annoying but probably just a bug.
I’ve done the usual thing and uploaded samples straight from the device to YouTube, and made them available for download if you want to look at quality without YouTube’s transcode.
720p Rear Camera Video
VGA Front Camera Video
Again, the Lumia 900 video looks good even if it’s just 720p thanks to a generous bitrate, and inclusion of stereo audio is also a plus. Eventually Windows Phones will do 1080p30 video encodes, but that’s something which will come with even better SoCs.
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tipoo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
It seems to me like Microsoft is deliberately capping WP7 phones so that Apollo phones will look even better by comparison, with the SoC single core limitations and screen resolution caps. I wonder if this phone or other WP7 phones will be able to get WP8 then, or if that will only be on dual core phones?melgross - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
The OS can't handle multi cores or a higher Rez. That's just the way it is. Since that's going to limit sales, why would they deliberately want to do that?Yes, there's a fork of CE (which is what WP7 uses), which allows dual cores, but it has it's own problems as a phone OS.
tipoo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
But I'm still wondering if current phones will be able to get WP8. Since it has a new kernel, my guess would be no.N4g4rok - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
It's possible, but my not be a profitable. There's always that ugly little trade off between going next generation or supporting legacy hardware.I think what they do with it will depend on how different the OS itself is in terms of features and UI. If it brings an entirely new suite of capabilities that would not be as efficient on single-core platforms, then it might not hurt to let the previous generation to go to pasture. Otherwise, they might loose that regard as an efficient handset.
Then again, who knows if the kernel in Apollo will be built with the intension to utilize dual core hardware, or if the upgraded hardware will be mainly for drawing attention from developers.
Braumin - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I don't think the kernel will matter. The new kernel will support far more hardware than the old one.When you upgrade your PC from Windows XP to Windows 7, the kernel changes, but the hardware doesn't.
I assume that since basically there are only a couple of different hardware specs for WP7, they will make it possible. The question of course is whether the hardware vendor will bother with the upgrade. In most cases, I would say no, but I also think Nokia will be the exception.
We'll see in the fall though!
ol1bit - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Yea, Microsoft is way behind in the phone game. They need to keep up, how long have they been play with WP7 now, and still no high rez or multi-core?I think MS continues to make bad decisions. Who wanted a single threaded OS 3 years ago? They just looked at Apple current and said we like that, and lets design ours just like that.
Goggle looks to the future and started Android out multi-threaded. I hope Alppol isn't a hack job with fake multi-threading added in.
robco - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
The $99 price point is interesting, same as the iPhone 4, but with more storage and LTE. I suppose that works since they're still behind the 4S a bit.I like WP7 and if I decide to ditch iOS, it would be my next choice. I just hope MS will support more chipsets and higher display resolutions sooner rather than later. Of course the big issue for me, and others in this area, is the carrier issue in the US. I won't go back to AT&T. For many people the reception is fine and the service tolerable, but not where I live. So far the only WP7 handsets on Sprint or VZW are even more dated.
MS has a lot of ground to gain, but it's not as if they don't have the resources to throw at it...
NeoteriX - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Brian,Your insight into the display, and in particular, digging up the optical path of the ClearBlack technology, may be overlooked by many. But it's really something where your obvious optics education/background gives you and AnandTech significant added value over the droves of blathering nontechnical review sites and blogs.
Kudos.
EddyKilowatt - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
If this is the kudos section, let me award one too, for posting and discussing the MediaInfo screencap showing the video and audio codec settings. That too is the kind of non-blathering, solid tech info that I'm glad you guys specialize in.(I actually googled "lumia 900 video bitrate"... and must confess I grinned a knowing grin when I saw AnandTech pop up in the first screen of hits.)
name99 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
"Interestingly enough Nokia does note the presence of Rx diversity for WCDMA on the Lumia 900 front and center, both under their “design” tab and under Data Network on the specifications page. It’s awesome to see another handset vendor realize that great cellular performance is noteworthy"I'm rather more cynical than you. Note that they do NOT support HSPA MIMO.
My guess is that at least part of talking up their diversity antenna is specifically to deflect from that --- throw out some techno-lingo about how we have multiple antennas to "maximize RF performance" and hope no-one notices some conspicuous holes in our HSPA features.