Full auto
Every smartphone has the “default”setting. The pre-loaded point and shoot setting that is the most commonly used setting on any smartphone, especially when it comes to needing to quickly pull your phone out and take a shot. With the OIS-enhanced Nexus 5 this becomes a great deal easier, because there’s less time needed to pause for the shot. Unfortunately, right now any time you save not caring about motion is eaten up by the slightly longer focus time. This puts the Nexus 5 on the same page as everyone else, so instead of a motion test we went for a tap-to-focus test.
When put up against the Nokia Lumia 928, HTC One, and Moto X, the Nexus 5 did a great job. It’s not the best photo of the group — that title goes to the Lumia in this round — but it’s a far better shot than the HTC One or Moto X.
What made this photo complicated was multiple light sources. The light from the rear window combined with direct sunlight from the window to the right made it difficult to choose what would be the best way to compensate. The HTC One let in way too much light, while the Moto X just looks washed out. The Nexus 5 does a great job of being color accurate, but didn’t handle the light quite as well as the Lumia.
HDR outdoors
Being able to take HDR photos is supposed to be something the Nexus 5 should be really good at. Qualcomm has included burst-mode computational photography in the Snapdragon 800, which allows multiple photos to be taken and stitched together to form an HDR photo instead of just using a software blending. This should mean that the phone will take great HDR photos that would be much better for editing and enhancing.
Compared to the iPhone 5S, Motorola Droid Maxx, and HTC One, the Nexus 5 took great HDR photos. The color accuracy was much better than the over-saturated HTC One and the washed out Droid Maxx, and managed to be quite similar to the photo taken by the iPhone 5S. If you look up in the top left corner of the phone taken by the 5S and compare it to the Nexus 5 you can see that the iPhone did a better job capturing the sky, but otherwise they are both great photos.
Low light
Over the past year, low light photography is a topic that has come up a lot. Nokia, HTC, Motorola, and many others have used the ability to take low light photos as a big selling point for the cameras on their smartphones. In fact, in a low light shootout done earlier this year on Geek.com we found that the HTC One was at the head of the class when it came to shooting in the dark, where other top phones (like the Galaxy S4) fell far behind.The Nexus 5 makes no bold claims regarding superior low light performance, but it’s still an important thing to look at.
The end result was more than a little surprising. While the Nexus 5 is the darkest of the four photos, it is by far the most accurate. HTC cranks up the ISO to reveal light that even the human eye can’t see, while the Moto X just looks like a blotchy mess. The Lumia 928 cheats a little bit with its Xenon bulb that fires even when the flash is turned off, revealing a clear and bright foreground photo but completely unrealistic and inaccurate sky in the background. The Nexus 5 is almost exactly what I saw in the foreground, but is unfortunately grainy and blurry in the background.
Technically the winner here in the HTC One, but the Nexus 5 did a much better job than I had anticipated
Source : Geek.com
Image : Geek.com
