I've been looking at lots of samples of pictures taken by the n900 camera. They all look really good and blow other cell cameras out of the water.

I know its not meant to be as good as a high end point and shoot, and maybe compete with the lower end ones.

However, my judge of a camera's quality is generally if I find a sign with some text on it that is just out of my readable range (which I have 20/17 vision) and I snap a picture of it on the camera at base optical zoom, then I should be able to go to the saved image, zoom in on the text and be able to read it, even if it is only just better than what I could do with my eyes.

So basically in my opinion a good camera should capture more detail in a scene than even my eyes can.

Does the n900 camera pass this test? With only 5 MP I'm thinking maybe not, but anyone care to comment?

5 MP shouldn't be a limiting factor. My LG Viewty* is 5 MP and it passes this test.

But your "test" can only be used to compare camera resolution when the cameras have the same field of view (in degrees). Otherwise, the one that is more "zoomed in" (narrower field of view) will be able to more easily show the fine detail.

Regards,
Roger

*Actually I should say "my daughter's LG Viewty", because I gave her the phone in anticipation of having an N900 for myself by the end of October (sob!).

Note that the N900 only crops (not scales) when you shoot in 3.5mpix.

What I have noticed is this - images that are taken at 5MP should be fairly large - instead we end up with ~800k images. My suspicion is that Nokia have done the same thing Google did in order to get speedy writes to the sdcard. They have dropped the Jpeg quality to < 100%

Its difficult for me to be able to verify this unfortunately. Anyone with a little more knowledge than me care to weigh in on this?

I wonder if that is true, and if so would be nice to have a way to change that setting somehow (assuming it can be changed at all).

I checked the jpg info
the jpeg compression is between 70% and 85%
it is very high.

Ahh ok - thats a shame then. I wish that was something we could adjust. While 70-80% is adequate it is always nice to get pictures in lossless (or close to) format as well.

Again I am sure that this was done to expedite the speed of writes to the sdcard, but I do wish they had given us the option.

The jpeg quality is settable via a config file - 100% gives 2-3mb files, but the quality is not THAT different..

/etc/gdigicam/gdigicam-camerabin.conf ? Interesting!

Yes. Needs enabling and restarting the camera daemon. DISCLAIMER: Do NOT touch any of that stuff unless you are ready to reflash if things go south.