Seriously, Nokia? Do you honestly think that the average consumer knows or cares who/what Carl Zeiss is? Or that talking about a “wider aperture” is going to stir the least bit of interest in anyone? That is the tact Nokia is using in advertising their Lumia 900 Windows Phone (yet another ad in the lackluster “Smartphone Beta Test” campaign). If you must state that a wider aperture helps in low light, then you’ve already lost. Why even mention the wider aperture? Wider than what? Maybe photo geeks would care about Carl Zeiss optics or a wider aperture – but not in a smart phone.
The reality is that most people think their smartphone cameras are just fine. Maybe not “great”, but definitely good enough. Other than photo geeks, people seldom complain about the quality of their smartphone cameras. After all, they are smartphone cameras. And even if some people think that smartphone cameras could be better, does better-than-average picture quality really sell many smartphones?
I was going to stop writing here, but I did a little digging and found out that early reviews for the Nokia Lumia 900 show that the phone actually takes terrible pictures in low light! And it’s not an isolated problem. Across the board people are complaining about the quality of the low light pictures. Just look at the comments in the YouTube video link above! And other reviews show that the Lumia 900 doesn’t take pictures any better than an iPhone 4S. You can read more comments about the lackluster low-light pictures in an article which mentions, “Nokia is set to release more firmware updates to introduce Internet sharing among other features missing from the Windows Phone experience.” I think that the ability to share pictures on the Internet from a smartphone is a pretty key feature that most people expect nowadays. Certainly much more important than Carl Zeiss optics or wider apertures. So once again, this is just another example showing that when it comes to Windows Phones and the Nokia Lumia 900, the beta test is far from over.