I had originally promised you a camera comparison between the Sony Ericsson C905 and the Nikon D80, but I didn’t have time to do this comparison back then. Now, we’re back with a large comparison between the C905 and the Nikon D90 (don’t have the D80 with me currently, so this is the other choice).

About this duel
All the samples shot with the C905 were shot with automatic settings and flash disabled, unless needed. All the samples were shot in high quality JPEG mode. The Nikon D90 was set to aperture priority mode (f/3.8), with flash disabled. All the samples were shot in RAW (uncompressed file format), and converted to TIFF with Adobe Lightroom 2.2 using default conversion settings.

It’s important that you’re aware of the fact that you can completely change how the pictures look when you shoot in RAW format. If they’re too dark, you can simply knock up the exposure in the post-processing without affecting the quality of the picture. This is not possible with pictures shot in JPEG format, which means the C905 is suffering from a severe disadvantage even before we kick off the comparison.

It’s also rather important to point out that there’s no such thing as a perfect RAW converter, and that they’ll all convert the RAW images differently. Most of the unprocessed RAW images, in my opinion, are better than the converted ones, but like I said earlier on, you can always change the look of RAW images.

I will briefly comment on each set of samples, and pick a definitive winner in the end of this post. All the following samples are 100 percent crops of the original pictures. The JPEGs are unprocessed and the RAW images have been converted, as explained earlier on. To cut down on the bandwidth, I’ve decided not to include the full resolution samples.

Sample 1

The C905 had to make use of its flash in this shot, which results in an over-exposed picture. Its noise levels are greater than that of the Nikon D90, and the greys have a red / purple tint in the edges.

Sample 2

Here we start to see the benefits of a having a much larger and more advanced imaging sensor onboard. There’s no noise in the D90 sample and the bush at the bottom is sharp, whilst the C905 sample is very noisy, especially in the blacks, and the bush is a really blurry.

Sample 3

Much better white balance in the D90 sample and the edges are sharp and crisp. The C905 sample has a pink tint to it, and the edges are rather noisy. The C905 sample is too saturated.

Sample 4

The amount of details in the D90 shot is staggering, when compared to that in the C905 sample. It’s clear that the post-processing on the C905 is removing valuable details in the picture. The white balance in both cameras is good, although slightly better in the case of the D90.

Sample 5

Again, it’s clear that the D90 sample is much more detailed. The sample from the C905 is slightly more saturated, but overall it’s the image from the C905 that’s most preferable.

Sample 6

This is how a bad RAW conversion looks. There’s a horrible blue tint over the D90 sample, whereas the sample from the C905 is much better in terms of colours. But again, the D90 image is more much detailed, and despite it being a lot darker, it also suffers from less noise.

Sample 7

Slightly more accurate colours in the C905 sample, but it’s a lot worse than the D90 sample in every other thinkable aspect.

Sample 8

Here’s another crop of the picture above. The Nikon D90 is miles ahead of the C905.

Sample 9

Chromatic aberration is very obvious in the C905 sample, and this is exactly what I wanted to test with this sample. It also shows that the D90 is much better at handling the transition of dark elements to bright elements.

Sample 10

Here’s another crop of the picture above. What’s obvious about this is that the sample from the Nikon D90 is brighter than that of the C905, and yet the D90 is still a lot better at dealing with the transition from dark to bright.

Sample 11

The text is easily readable in the sample from the Nikon D90. What actually surprised me a bit is that you can actually read parts of the text in the C905 sample, although it is quite hard.

Sample 12

Much better white balance and exposure in the D90 sample. The blacks are black and there’s absolutely no noise in the black areas – one can hardly say that about the sample from the C905.

Sample 13

Another crop of the image above. The exposure is still better in the D90 sample, and you can actually read the text ‘WINDOWS / MAC OS’ on the Adobe Lightroom box. The colours of the C905 shot are more appealing, but not correct.

Sample 14

The D90 trumps the C905 again. The black areas are black and the white areas are white, although with a mild level of chromatic abberration around the edges. This is expected in these kinds of extreme situations, and easily removed when converting from RAW. The sample from the C905 looks terrible.

Sample 15

Same as above. Blacks are black in the D90 sample, while they are grey / purple / green in the C905 sample.

Conclusion

As expected, the Nikon D90 pretty much slaughters the C905 in every single aspect. It clearly proves that you want to be looking for a real camera, preferably a dSLR camera, instead of a mobile phone the next time you’re looking for a camera. The small sensors in mobile phones are simply not good enough to replace a standalone camera yet, and it’ll probably stay that way for a number of years ahead.

If you’ve got any questions about this quick comparison, feel free to ask.

I can finally say that our review of the Sony Ericsson C905 is now completed, and we’re pretty happy with the result. Almost 7,000 words and more than 120 pictures went into this review, and my fellow blog editor, NightBlade, has been a great help with this review. I hope you’ll enjoy reading his contributions to the review as much as I did.

We’re quite pleased with the C905, and ended up giving it a USEB Score of 83%, which is the highest score we’ve ever given a feature phone.

Go check out the review for yourself right here!

Video sample 1 [2.33 MB]

Video sample 2 [1.59 MB]

Video sample 3 [1.14 MB]

We haven’t got any details as to when we’ll post a review of the C905, but we’re hoping to do so this month. We’ve also got a rather nice comparison coming up soon. Here’s a hint of what it’s about:

By the way, we’re closing in on a total of 36,000 views for our videos at Blip.tv – thanks for all the views, hopefully you didn’t regret pressing the play-button