Nokia Lumia 710 Review - T-Mobile's Nokia WP7

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.