Motorola ZN5 vs. Sony Ericsson C905 vs. Nokia N82

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	Motorola ZN5 vs. Sony Ericsson C905 vs. Nokia N82	By Sindre Lia, 29 June 2008

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Sony Ericsson once ranked at the top of the camera phone charts. We take an in-depth look at the officially announced camera contenders of 2008.

Back in 2006, the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Nokia N80 were the champions in the camera phone market. The latter even came with support for Kodak's upload-to-print service. In 2007, the Nokia N82 represented a huge step forward for Nokia, and Sony Ericsson's K850 wasn't quite able to match it. At present time, the Nokia N82 is still the one to beat, but both Sony Ericsson and Motorola have recently announced their latest and greatest camera phones to compete with the popular N-series model.

Motorola and Kodak

Ever since introducing its mobile photo services, Kodak has worked hard to come up with hardware for camera phones, and Motorola announced an agreement with Kodak last year. This agreement has led to the Motorola ZN5, which was announced last week. In terms of sensor technology for still images, the Motorola ZN5 offers something similar to the Nokia N82, but where the latter provides 30 fps, VGA video recording, the former stops at 15 fps, QCIF video recording. However, the Motorola ZN5 offers a cool multi-shot shooting mode, that stitches together three shots into one wide panorama picture. Lastly, it can save 8-bit RAW images in TIFF image format.

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson's Cyber-shot phones are well-known to most people, but it's also a well-known fact that they've faced stiff competition from Nokia in the last couple of years. As such, the new Sony Ericsson C905 to be released this fall will be crucial for Sony Ericsson's continued Cyber-shot development. After all, dedicated camera phones should at all times bring innovation to the table, otherwise, what's the point?

With its improved sensor and lens technology, the Sony Ericsson C905 seems to do just that though, and it will also offer features such as face recognition and a smile shutter. Furthermore, the phone will offer an image stabilizer (not optical) when using the Twilight landscape and Landscape scene modes. Unfortunately, according to Sony Ericsson, the Sony Ericsson C905 will only offer 30 fps, QVGA video recording.

If everything works as planned for Sony Ericsson, the C905 will most likely be placed one step behind Sony's low-end cameras in terms of overall camera performance. And that would be as close as any dedicated camera phone has come to date in matching point-and-shoot cameras.

The X factor

The X factor for both the Motorola ZN5 and the Sony Ericsson C905 are their image processors. Nokia has made significant improvements to their own image processing technology over the years, and the upcoming Nokia 7510 Supernova for instance, will ship with a new processing algorithm for its 2-megapixel camera this fall. Without state-of-the-art image processing technology, many of the advanced features in phones like the Motorola ZN5 and Sony Ericsson C905 will simply have little or no impact. Motorola uses Kodak Perfect Touch technology for this purpose and the claims sound promising, while Sony Ericsson is supposed to be using a totally revamped image processing engine in the C905. Stay tuned for our extensive test results of these two camera phones, which should be released late summer and early fall, respectively.