From the photos being posted on the Flickr N900 Pool I have been observing that the Carl Zeiss optics (Tessar) installed in the N900 is exhibiting, particularly in Macro or near macro focus mode, a classic shallow depth of field focus typical of a small f-Stop.

The N900 specs indicate that the Lens has an F-Stop of 2.8 and a Focal length of 5.2 mm, which for such a small sensor is good. But a real camera it’s not, from all it’s behavior, it looks like the F-Stop is fixed wide open which make any control over the depth-of-field meaningless. The lens does exhibit classic Carl Zeiss high contrast, which results in a very sharp photo. but there appears to be no real ’shutter’ either. Motion effects behave more like video scanning where all sensor elements are NOT sampled at the same time like a real shutter would produce.

Over all the ‘Camera’ in the N900 could best be qualified as a very high end WebCam.

With regard to the sensor itself it appears to be relatively low in ‘noise’, probably more due to the restricted ISO controls than to the sensor. However one thing that I’ve noted is some jpeg artifacts that could probably use a little refinement in a firmware update. And guess what? no ‘raw’ mode from the camera, unless someone in the Maemo community wants to add this feature.

Still, I wish I had my pre-ordered N900 now … I could have posted my own photos.

Tags: Carl Zeiss, Flickr, Maemo, Nokia N900