Review: Motorola ZINE ZN5
Photos
When we first saw this phone several months ago, Motorola had a large number of blow-ups available to look at. It was hard not to be impressed with what we saw. On the largest pictures (16 x 20), everything looked excellent. Good color, good focus, good lighting balance. The exposures looked to be spot on, and some of them even had a tasteful use of fill flash to make sure dark areas weren't underexposed.
Since I didn't have quite the wide selection of locales and subject matter that Motorola and Kodak's pros did, our pictures were less thrilling in content, but just as good when it comes to quality.
Most indoor shots we took were good if not excellent. There was very little to no grain at all. The software and full flash work very well at making sure subjects are properly lit. Pictures blown up on a 19-inch monitor looked excellent. You could definitely take pictures worthy of blowing up to 16x20 in size and hang them on your walls.
Video
Video is a major disappointment. The ZN5 captures video at a lousy 15 frames per second, while phones such as the Nokia N95 capture at 30 frames per second. The result is videos that are less than smooth. There's noticeable choppiness, blurriness and grain. The video capture does, however, get the lighting and exposure correct. You can capture decent videos that are YouTube worthy and MMS worthy, no doubt, but video quality lags behind the camera's capabilities enough to make you scratch your hand and wonder what Motorola and Kodak were thinking.
3GPP / MPEG-4 format (viewable with QuickTime)
Preview: Motorola MOTOZINE ZN5
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Motorola ZINE ZN5
