While other phone companies prefer to keep stacking more and more pixels into pinhole-sized cameras with terrible lenses, Nokia has actually taken a major step in improving the optics around the sensor for better picture quality. Its latest camera phone, the N86 8MP, is the very first to feature a variable aperture camera.
Like on a quality point-and-shoot cam, the aperture, which controls the amount of light admitted, will adjust to different shooting conditions automatically. This should give it better performance under a variety of lighting conditions, in contrast to the de facto fixed aperture lenses used on camera phones. Nokia has also coupled this advance with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.
The standard N86 8MP will include 8GB of memory for storing up to 4,000 images, but a microSD card will allow it to expand by up to 16GB. The camera phone also gets an unusual OLED screen, protected by hardened scratch-resistant glass.
As per usual with Nokia’s latest releases, the N86 8MP will debut in Europe first during the second quarter of 2009, with a retail price of 375 Euro, or about $470 USD.
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