When I tested the Nokia Lumia 800 in London my biggest fear was that the camera would not be good enough for me – I have after all tried the N8 camera and thought it would be impossible to beat in the smartphone world (not that I loved the still shots it produced, but the video quality was amazing). However now when I have the Lumia 800 in my hands I can with hand on my heart say that at least the photo quality is enough for me (and I do absolutely not want an N8 anymore after this). Sure, in low light the images get grainy, as you would expect. But that’s pretty much the only bad thing I have to say about it: macro is fantastic for such a small device, the colors are good (enough), and in natural light (landscape) you can get some outstanding shots if you play around with it and especially if you use a tripod, which I unfortunately didn’t do.

Now I obviously would edit most of my DSLR photos (contrast, brightness, sharpness if needed) before publishing them online, but these pictures are straight from the Lumia 800 – no editing done. If I would do something with the contrast etc, they could look more professional, but I like to think that a smartphone is a device from which you publish your photos pretty much immediately without editing them first (unless you use some quick photo editing application – there are several on the market). So what you see is what you get.

No smartphone could ever replace a DSLR anyway, so what I’m asking for is to have a device that can take nice snapshots that I can tweet or Facebook or just keep as a memory, and be proud of. I don’t want to share bad quality, but the Lumia 800 makes you excited about taking and sharing pictures – because they look good.

If you know any other Lumia 800 photo galleries online, share a link please! Would love to see what kind of images other people have taken with it!

Click on the photos to get to my Flickr where you can see full size versions of them.