Let’s get back to the devices now. Recently the situation around Motorola started to change, and the crisis is about to settle, and a number of hope-inspiring moments become clearly visible through the veil of trouble. A number of new product lines are steadily forming up, a great deal of attention is paid to the musical and imaging direction as well as to the Dual-SIM segment. Over the course of the next year, quite a few new smartphones are expected to be announced by the company. The company's current music flagship ROKR E8, despite of the huge delay, still looks very interesting, being a unique combination of design and audio solutions. The extremely high sound quality, the innovative keypad with a customizable symbol set, the best materials and assembly quality ever seen in a music phone coupled with a very affordable price are our reasons to think that the ROKR series enters a revival stage.

On the cameraphone market, Nokia is the only and clear leader, having at their disposal an unmatched number of various models sporting an excellent photo quality. Nokia N82, the flagship model, is justifiedly called the best cameraphone of 2008 - the camera powers are set at the maximum and the price is quite fair. Motorola did their best in designing a competitive product, dubbing their new child MotoZINE ZN5. Both models have a lot in common, so to say ZN5 is closer to N82 than any other 5 Mp cameraphone available from the market these days. It should be noted that we aren't hinting at possible design or idea plagiarism, it's just our experiences that were very much the same after we played a bit with the both handsets. The photos taken with the phones say for themselves, regardless of all the difference in the handset design. ZN5 looks better, more luxurious, since exterior design has long been known to reside on Motorola's specialty list.

Supported Networks:	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, EDGE class 12
Storage:	400 Mb of user memory
Screen:	2.4”, 240x320, 262K colors
Connectivity:	USB2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (A2DP supported), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Camera:	5 Mp (up to 2562x1944), Xenon flash, Kodak post-processing algorithms
Battery:	capacity - 960 mAh up to 7,9 hours of talktime up to 330 hours of standby
Size:	117.9 x 50.9 x 13.1 mm
Weight:	117 g
Guiding price:	€300

The both handsets share a comparable size, the maximum thickness at the camera nest is also on the same level, ZN5 is a bit slimmer in all other areas, though this difference is marginal. The most part of the casing is made from metal, the same substance was used in V8. Side pieces and keypad framing are composed of plastic. The bottom part is also plastic, though unexpectedly covered in a thick layer of rubber instead of the traditional soft-touch coating. For the first time in history we saw rubber to make part of such a high-ranking product, which is certainly a plus. Should the handset happen to fall, the rubber is sure to dampen the impact, the phone will never get slippery because of sweat - it will always feel firm in the hand.

The only color version in which the product is issued is a dark gray metal. The battery bay has a matte surface easily exposing fingerprints and worn spots. The keyboard uses the same matte coating and looks like a solid piece of plastic lacking any perceptible segmentation into buttons, tiny bumps indicating the key positions. From the point of view of ergonomics, the solution doesn't yield to the traiditonal buttons, they have enough feedback and tightness to be reliable enough. The navigation button, though it is rather compact-sized, doesn't give reason for any reprimands either. The right edge hosts the sound controls, the shoot button and the keypad block slider. An analogous solution was implemented in ROKR E8, it's as handy as they come. On the left edge, the standard 3.5 headset jack is located, neighboring on the flap-protected microUSB slot.

The handset comes with a sole polyphonical speaker, though its quality and maximum volume are extremely high. The MicroSD memory card slot is hidden beneath the battery, which means no hot swapping, which is an obvious yet uncritical downside. Just nearby is the SIM card slot.

The most intriguing aspect of Motorola ZN5 is its camera. Motorola have been long out of serious cameraphone production, so ZN5 is destined to hold the throne of Motorola's leading photo model for quite a long period of time. Understanding to the full the market hardly suffers from a lack of comparable devices (Nokia N82, 6220 classic, Sony Ericsson K850i, LG Viewty and others), Motorola maximized their effort to make their invention as cheap as possible, the relatively low price is one of the key elements of ZN5 market positioning. Offering comparable or superior opportunities for a price keeping on a level with the rest of the flagships, Motorola plans an assault on a seemingly unassailable market. Should all the factors involved happen to work as Motorola expects, the success is inevitable.

Hardware Implementation, Keypad, Ergonomics

The camera unit sits at the top of the handset, where the phone is some 5 mm thicker than at all other spots. A lens guard is present, it uses quite a traditional design, doesn't stick above the casing surface. Stray openings are virtually excluded, the same mechanism was utilized by Sony Ericsson C702, for instance. The lens guard features a Kodak logo, which should normally indicate the use of Kodak optics. Nokia traditionally utilizes camera lenses produced by Carl Zeiss while Motorola seldom gives any clue about the origin of their optics, paying more attention to the post-processing algorithms, which are for sure as Kodak as they could be, in the case of our ZN5. How important is the influence of this fact on the quality of the resulting photos will be disclosed a bit later.

ZN5 is Motorola's first phone ever to employ a xenon flash, it's extremely pwerful, at times it openly beats in power the analogous unit employed by Nokia N82, which has been largely considered the best unit of its kind on the whole market. However the ZN5 flash occasionally fails to adjust the flash power so all the objects within the immediate vicinity of the lens get 'overburnt' or 'blinded'. All the competitive products (SonyEricsson K850i, Samsung G800/810) are equipped with much weaker flash units. Another strong side of Motorola's creation is the location at which the flash is nestled - there's a big distance between it and the shoot button, so it is unlikely to get the view blocked with the fingers, the problem which commonly plagued K850i. Additional auto-focus backlighting allows for auto-focusing in insufficiently lit environments. The effective distance of the flash makes up for about 4 meters, which is just enough for the majority of situations.

The rocker residing on the right edge of the casing serves as the camera launcher, the volume controls reassign themselves as the zoom controls during photo and video sessions. Motorola ROKR E8 was the first handset to feature a Morphing keypad which changed the key labels once the camera was switched on: the numericals gave way to the four virtual buttons acting as camera and gallery controls. The new ZN5 has a traditional keypad (not of the touch-type), and the camera and gallery control buttons are stuck between the rows of numerical buttons and are only active in the corresponding modes. If not in such a mode, these controls remain inactive, eliminating any possibility of stray keystrokes. The buttons are rather tight yet have a shot move. This kind of keyboard seems to be more comfortable in operation than the touch keyboard employed by E8.

So, only one button is highlighted during shooting (besides the functional ones), it serves for switching between the viewfinder and the photo preview mode. In the preview mode, two other buttons become active – one of them serves to delete the picture, the other one gives access to one of the four options available under the Simple Share function. In the standby mode, gallery is conjured up by pressing a dedicated key to the left side of the navigation button. All the camera- and gallery-related buttons bear a characteristic purple backlighting. This looks quite cool and is in keeping with the general style set by the new ZN5 design. Purple also acts as the primary color of the default color theme used by the phone.

In the standby mode, gallery is conjured up by pressing a dedicated key to the left side of the navigation button. All the camera- and gallery-related buttons bear a characteristic purple backlighting. This looks quite cool and is in keeping with the general style set by the new ZN5 design. Purple also acts as the primary color of the default color theme used by the phone.

In the viewfinder mode, the screen refresh rate is rather high, as well as focusing and image acquisition speeds. Motorola ZN5 offers on the quickest cameras on the market, especially in the sense of 5 Mp devices. Even RAW photos are opened almost instantly, transitions between photos take minimal time possible. This is no miracle but just a dedicated IPU (Imaging processing unit) which was added to boost the camera and gallery up.

Screen

The screen is powered by the TFT technology. The matrix is produced by Sharp. The screen diagonal amounts to 2,4 inches, which is quite up to the modern standards. The screen quality is very high, bearing an evident advantage over Nokia N82. The colors are maximally natural and saturated, it’s one of the best screens on the market. Its only drawback is the bad behavior in the sun – too much glaring incomparable to what we have with Nokia N82. That’s most likely due to the thick hardened glass protecting the screen matrix. On the one hand, it’s very resistant to physical damage, a long period of active use left it absolutely intact, without a single scratch. The price for that, however, is the bad glaring in the sun. The comparison photos tell for themselves.

The maximum brightness level is rather impressive, the brightness can be adjusted with the help of a six-notch scale, 50% is being just enough in most situations.

Battery

Beneath the back cover, you will see a BX50 930 mAh battery, which can serve up to three days of moderate duty (about 40 minutes of talktime, two hours of listening to the music, an hour of shooting photos, an hour of web surfing via Wi-Fi). Such a score is quite decent for the phones of the latest generation, which is achieved through the use of the Deep Sleep Mode (DSM, C3 ACPI mode).

In this mode, the CPU enters a state in which the power consumption rate drops to a very low level, which doesn’t tell on the application performance at all. Switching to DSM mode is totally transparent to the user, as well as returning from this state to a more active ‘lifestyle’ when necessary. If we recall other Motorola models, even very early ones, this mode has been around ever since though it was only accessible from the service menu.

Motorola ZN5 Battery

Model	Motorola ZN5	Nokia N82
Regular duty	3 days	3 days
Multimedia cycle, video (3GP)	3:25	4:33
Multimedia cycle, audio (MP3)	15:20	11:54

Connectivity.

Motorola ZN5 is a quad-band device (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) with EDGE (Class 12) support. It doesn’t support WCDMA networks, which is a native limitation for all phones running Linux Java. This situation will be preserved until 2009, leaving the 3G support as a privilege of Symbian- and P2K-operated devices, which are gradually phasing out from the company’s portfolio.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR stands for MotoZINE’s wireless functionality. The unit worked as it was supposed, leaving no reasons for reproaching. Bluetooth options include the activation status (on / off), shared device list, default storage location for incoming files (phone memory or expansion card), phone name and other standard parameters. An Bluetooth indicator flickers on the face panel once the unit enters an active state. The device detection period isn’t customizable: three minutes.

While searching for Bluetooth devices, it’s possible to specify the device type:

• All
• Headset
• PC
• Phone
• PDA
• Printer

If all the device types are selected, each found device is given an icon indicating its type. This icon is shown left to the device name.

The following profiles are supported:

• Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP)
• Advanced Audio/Video Remote Conference Profile
• Dial-Up Networking Profile
• Generic Access Profile
• Serial Port Profile
• Generic Object Exchange Profile
• Object Push Profile
• Handsfree Profile
• Headset Profile
• Synchronization Profile
• Basic Image Profile
• File Transfer Profile
• HID (host) Profile

USB

USB 2.0 powers the wire connection used during Phone-to-PC sessions, the following modes are supported:

• Picture Transfer
• Memory Card,
• Media Synchronisation,
• Modem,
• USB Printing,
• Tools,
• Modem & Tools

There’s no option which would enable prompting for the connection type each time you connect the phone to the PC, so you have to choose an appropriate mode beforehand. Connected in the Memory Card mode, the phone keeps both its memory card and onboard memory visible as flash storage units on the PC. Onboard memory and flash card display the same data transfer speed.

Wi-Fi

ZN5 is the first Motorola phone to include a Wi-Fi unit. The 802.11b/g connection can be used, for example, to upload the photos to the web (using a Kodak Imaging Gallery account), as well as for all other imaginable purposes. Secure connections can be set up with a single tap of the finger on a user-specified button without the need to enter the network security key every time. Wi-Fi works as it should, we didn’t notice any bugs, the signal sensivity is on a high level. The options include the saved networks list, three security settings (WEP, WPA and WPA2) and the network info viewing.

TV-Out

A TV-Out is available (a TV cable comes in the box with the phone). The settings are very scarce: PAL or NTSC, that’s just all.

Performance

Motorola MotoZINE ZN5 has a high performance, up to the standard of other recent Motorola products like E8. The newest Motorola phones seem to have a better performance than comparable rival solutions, closely approaching Sony Ericsson in this parameter and leaving the slow Samsung phones far behind. The high performance owes to the implementation of a powerful hardware platform powered by Freescales CPUs with operating frequencies above 500 Mhz, further boosted by interface optimizations.

Model	Motorola ZN5	Nokia N82	SonyEricsson K850i
Jbenchmark 1.0.1 Score	7306	4909	8567
Text	1860	1399	2243
2D Shapes	1840	1254	2289
3D Shapes	1143	598	1395
Fill Rate	766	321	1024
Animation	1697	1500	2110
Jbenchmark 2.0.1 Score	600	522	641
Image Manipulations	552	397	579
Text	978	655	922
Sprites	560	512	612
3D Transform	910	821	928
User Interface	282	488	365
Jbenchmark 3D HQ	346	889	408
Jbenchmark 3D LQ	361	967	420
Triangles ps	34411	46270	35391
KTexels ps	3374	6111	3592
Jbenchmark HD Gaming Score	257 (8.6 fps)	625 (20.9 fps)	311 (7.2 fps)
Smooth triangles	83787	309698	104695
Textured triangles	61383	283732	71425
Fill rate, KTexels	1337	307	12996

The heap size is 2.0 Mb, the maximum Jar size is unlimited. A small decrease in performance in comparison with RAZR2 V8 can be explained by the fact that we dealt with a pre-sale sample of the device so the software needed a bit more of a final optimization. In practice, you can’t feel this difference unless you use very sensitive performance test software.

Hardware specifications.

Motorola MotoZINE ZN5 is very close to the previous devices based on the Freescale MXC275-30 platform running the Linux-Java operating system, like U9 or E8. Below we will dwell on the principal features of this platform:

MXC275-30 Platform Features

• StarCore SC140e DSP up to 208 MHz
• ARM11 applications processor up to 532 MHz
• Quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• GERAN data rates (max)—DL 236 Kbps, UL 118 Kbps
• GPRS/EGPRS (EDGE) slot up to Class 12 (4d/4u)
• Supports dynamic synchronous transfer mode (DTM) Class 5-11
• Octal speech
• DigRF interface support
• AMR-NB, HR, FR and EFR vocoders
• Hardware encryption of A5/1, A5/2, A5/3 and A5/4
• Optimized for open operating systems such as Linux and Symbian without adding any processor or accelerator
• Hardware acceleration for GPRS ciphering algorithm GEA/1, GEA/2, GEA/3 and GEA/4
• Single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC) for GMSK
• Secure boot
• Run-time integrity checker (RTIC)
• Integrated imaging processing unit (IPU) video accelerator
• Wireless connectivity features A-GPS (network assisted) interface support Bluetooth® interface support WLAN 802.11a/b/g interface support

Key Multimedia Features

• Video playback MPEG-4 Decode, CIF 30 fps, 384 Kbps H.264 Decode, CIF 30 fps, 384 Kbps WMV9 Decode, QCIF 30 fps, 384 Kbps
• Video capture MPEG-4 Encode, CIF 30 fps, 384 Kbps H. 264 Encode, QCIF 15 fps, 128 Kbps
• Video conferencing MPEG-4, CIF 30 fps H.263 and MPEG-4, CIF 30 fps decode, QCIF 15 fps encode
• Audio codecs AMR-NB, AMR-WB, AAC, AAC+, MP3 and MIDI
• Other capabilities Push to talk See what I see Cameras GPS WLAN Base IC Count=4 GSM/EDG E XCVR Module SDRAM Flash IRDA SIM MMC 1 2 3 GSM/EDGE PA SC140+ARM11™ Baseband Processor FEM Power Management Audio and Interface Temp. Illum. LED Vib. Ear Acc. Touch 11:07 a.m. Carrier 4 5 6 7 8 9 * 0 #

The most interesting point on the whole list is the CPU frequency, which amounts to 532 Mhz, which is enough to provide a high performance of all the basic actions of the operating system, default applications and interface. The onboard Imaging Processing Unit is the inalienable part of the MXC27530 platform and is normally used in models which require extra computing power for handling graphics, images and videos. In Motorola V8, U9 and E8 we witnessed gradual improvements in performance when it came down to graphics, though the boost was negligible and was largely due to the software optimizations. When ZN5 was in development, it was clear that 5 Mp photos taken in RAW mode will make the regular IPU choke, which resulted in an extra IPU getting installed on board. This gives the handset enough computing power to beat even Nokia N82 and its dedicated 2D/3D graphics accelerator which makes part of the OMPA 2420 platform.

The software side of Motorola ZN5 bases off the Linux Java (LJ) platform bearing the version number 6.3, which is the same with U9. The recently released ROKR E8 uses 7.1 instead, though the practical differences between the two revisions are purely formal (at least that’s true for these two products) – a few changes in the browser, several cosmetic changes in the PIM interface and so on.

The interface is based off Linux Java and can indeed be called one of the best interface solutions currently available on the market. It lacks the numerous limitations often found in many conventional phones. Up to the recent times, the company promoted Linux-based solutions on a number of markets (including the models E2, E6, A1200 and others), but the operating system was a bit different. Many customization possibilities normally found in the Linux system were blocked, only Java applets were officially supported. It would never let you use a native Linux application. Even at that, the devices remained very remarkable for their peculiar user interface. On August 7, 2007, Motorola officially announced MOTOMAGX – the next generation platform based on Linux. Unlike the previous Linux-based platforms (e.g. EzX), this system opened a new epoch characterized by vast support for third-party applications. Currently the platform is only 100% compatible with Java ME, but widget and native Linux application support is rumored to be added in the foreseeable future, making the platform comply with the latest requirements. The MOTODEV Studio SDK currently allows for Java applet creation; Linux application and WebUI SDKs are planned to appear in this year.

The first release of the MOTOMAGX platform includes such features as ARM 11 chipset support (allowing for lower power consumption rates), hi-res screen support, a full-fledged Phonebook applications, an easy Phone-to-PC synchronization for media files, a friendlier interface and a variety of miscellaneous applications which ought to make the user’s life easier. Of course, several limitations are still persistent, stemming from certain specific aspects of the software and hardware architecture. For instance, no 3G-compatible device based on the LJ platform is planned for release in the near future, effectively explaining the choice of operating system for V8 (LJ) and V9 (P2K) models.

Miscellaneous

In this paragraph we are going to enumerate the miscellaneous features fond in MotoZINE ZN5, which are unrelated to camera and imaging activities. The messing service, phonebook, PIM and browser aspects of this phone fully coincide with the same aspects of Moto U9, a review of which is available here:

Motorola Moto U9 Review

Interface

There are three interface themes available, the most interesting of them being «Kodak». Each of them can be customized to the user’s liking; there’s also a possibility to create a theme of your own, mixing the existing settings: background (any image file, e.g. a picture taken with the phone’s camera), background template (mosaic, fullscreen), interior and exterior screen splash screens, power on and power off greeting sequences, and finally the menu graphics style (including font settings and so on). For a newly created theme, you must specify a name and set the default sound signals like the ringtone, the incoming message sounds for SMS, E-mail, voice mail messages, the calendar sounds, etc.

Changed preinstalled themes can be reverted back to their default appearance, a newly created theme can be changed though importing settings from an already existing theme – everything’s quite easy to handle. Motorola phones traditionally offer very imaginative theme settings, only coming second after the latest Samsung models in this kind of rating.

Besides the set of themes, a number of miscellaneous settings are available: the backlight timeout, the logo timeout, brightness (6-notch scale), clock style (analog / numerical), as well as the application shortcut configuration. The same system is utilized in Nokia S40 phones, up to four application shortcuts can be placed on the desktop, each one corresponding to one of the directions of the navigation button. You can switch these icons to an invisible state, and the associated functions can be selected from an exhaustive list of all the available application. The shortcuts can duplicate one another.

The main menu can be viewed as icons or as a list, 9 icons or list items fall into the field of view at the same time. In addition to these traditional modes, the Spinner mode is available – the bottom of the screen shows a strip consisting of six icons, while the center of the screen is occupied by one large (currently selected) icon. The icons enjoy good graphics and smooth animation. This menu can be navigated through with the help of numerical keys, the subitems of each particular menu item can be only displayed in the list form. You can rearrange the order of icons to your ultimate liking. The menu is very friendly and customizable, serving to further personalize your handset.

CrystalTalk

The CrystalTalk technology provides better voice signal filtering techniques, making the interlocutors’ voice appear clearer and more easily comprehensible. This feature really does contribute to the cause: even in the noisiest streets we were able to hear one another again after CrystalTalk was switched on. The extent of signal filtering directly depends on the level of the ambient noise, the sophisticated algorithms do their best to make the wanted signal stronger while peeling away the noises. Motorola ZN5 along with the remaining few latest additions to the company’s portfolio seems to offer a considerably better voice signals than most competitors, with is a serious advantage.

Talking Phone

Similar to the many other models produced by the company, ZN5 is equipped with a voice control system which has a zero learning curve. The device is equally good at understanding all kinds of voices, mistakes occur but on a rare occasions. Holding the dial button pressed for a few seconds activates the voice control mode, and the handset prompts to pronounce a voice command or a person’s name form the phonebook to dial. The list of supported commands is very vast, all the necessary functions are present. For instance, when selecting a person to deal or adding a new contact record, the handset will ask you to pronounce the number, in case of a mistake you can always repeat the attempt after cancelling the action confirmation which is required for most voice-controlled operations to be carried out. In addition to the standard set of functions accessible with the voice control, a special setting dubbed Talking Phone comes with the phone as well. Here you can utilize the full power of the speech synthesizer engine, for example set it so the phone will pronounce the digits of the number you're looking up in the phonebook - along with the contactee's name, once the record is found. The menu and submenu titles can also be pronounced, the SMS and E-mail messages can be read aloud by the phone itself. The implementation is rather nice, the Talking Phone function is by no means another kitschy addition but rather a useful feature. It enjoys a certain degree of customization that, for instance, allows you to limit it to speaking the phone number only and mute the rest of hints. However some of the aspects of this functionality are disputable. There are no options customizing the characteristics of the synthesized speech - language selection, speed and so on - everything is fixated.

MP3 player and radio

The multimedia capabilities of the device are the same with Motorola E8, the audio quality is comparable for the two, the availability of the standard 3.5 mm jack allows for custom headsets to be used along with the gadget. The mp3 player interface is virtually the same with the rest of LJ phones manufactured by the company, it’s quite convenient and ergonomic. It’s not the best player around, though (for instance the latest Nokias have customizable skins and offer more options), but it still keeps far from the worse end of the scale. In the playback mode, the track title and the performer’s name are shown on the screen, the Album Arts function brings up the album cover image, the playbar, of course, is present as well (by the way it supports progressive rewinding), all of these accompanied by a few playback setting indicators.

The playlist can be sorted by performer, track, genre, recently played, frequently played and so on. The search function poses some real interest: you can search a track by title, author, album and by any other field, at times this feature proves extremely useful, for instance if you have lots of music.

Any song can be instantly sent over via MMS, E-Mail or Bluetooth. A Flight Mode is available, which effectively increases the overall playback cycle. Handling playlists is a very simple process, a newly created playlist requires a name and a storage location (onboard memory, flash card) to be specified, the last step is filling the list with your favorite tracks.

As for the supported media formats, the list runs as follows:

MP3	+
WMA	+
Polyphonic	+, 64 voices
XMF	+
AMR (Voice Tag)	+
AAC	+
AAC+	+
e-AAC+	+
i-Melody	-
SMAF	-
Midi (SMF)	+
SP-Midi	+
RA	+

The player can run in the background, the upper part of a minimized player window remains visible even in the standby mode, pressing the button up will revert the window back to its maximized state. The handset retains full functionality during continuous playback, all the menus and applications work as regular.

The settings include:

• Playback Settings (Repeat, Random)
• 9 equalizer presets (no user presets)
• Auto-repeat
• Bluetooth headset mode
• Add a track to a Playlist(s)
• Use a track for a ringtone

The number of equalizer presets has increased to nine from five originally available in ROKR E8, though there’s still no chance to create a new preset or edit one of the existing ones.

Unlike RAZR2 V8, the new ZN5 model keeps the Bass Boost and Spatial Audio settings (two seven-notch scales). What do these terms stand for is explained in the Motorola ROKR E8 review. The maximum audio volume makes a rather average score, however in a combination with a good headset it will be enough in most situations. All in all, ZN5 offers one of the best audio solutions around, refusing to yield even to music-proficient models.

The continuous playback cycle lasts for about 15 hours without recharging. The radio interface is very similar to the mp3 player, the options a rather few. It supports three ranges dubbed FM 1, FM 2, FM 3 where stations can be saved. The radio receiver is extremely sensitive, beating most competitor in this parameter. The headset sound is loud, of a high quality, obviously ranking among the best audio solutions on the market.

Camera interface and settings

Let’s pass on to the camera interface then. It utilizes the landscape orientation, the difference from other models is minimal. In the viewfinder mode, the screen displays a number of indicators such as the current resolution, the flash activation status, the macro mode activation status, the remaining number of shots which would fit into the phone’s memory or flash card. Pressing the navigation button up and down switches between the various modes. There are three focusing modes available: auto, macro, infinity (turning the focusing off), everything is quite traditional on this front. There are no extra options available, like face recognition or something else, however this hardly constitutes a drawback.

The special effects are very scarce, there’s no way to implement them right during the shooting. That’s only possible in the image editor which is to be discussed in a later section of the article. In the multiple shot mode, four shots are taken at an interval of about two seconds, and finally you are asked to choose the best pic. Queerly, other Motorola models like V8 have a customizable number of shots in the multiple shot mode, which is not the case with ZN5.

The landscape mode is very interesting, you make three shots of which none must cover more than a quarter of the other one. After that, the pictures are combined in a panoramic image, examples of which follow below.

The timer can be set either to 5 or to 10 seconds, a six shutter sounds in total are available (this sound can’t be turned off), photo preview time is selectable from 2, 4 or 6 seconds, video and photo files can be tagged. There’s no limit to the number of different tags, which allow for a better grouping of shots. You can select either the onboard memory or the expansion card as the default location for saved photos. There’s no way to select a specific folder, just like in Nokia Series 40 v5.

There are no photo quality settings, only the resolution can be changed:

• 1.2 MP
• 2.8 MP
• 4.4 MP
• 5.0 MP
• Binned RAW
• RAW

Now we are about to face Motorola MotoZINE’s most striking feature: the ability to save picture in RAW format. So let’s go on with the review.

RAW mode shooting

Seemingly, RAW shooting is a privilege reserved exclusively for the costly professional cameras, however this profile is now coming to the mobile world thanks to the appearance of Motorola ZN5. This very factor is what promotes ZN5 to a rank higher than anything else on the market, as far as the camera powers are concerned. Let’s try to see how all this goodness is achieved.

Many would say that the camera is actually capable of saving unprocessed RAW data acquired directly from the matrix, and would be mistaken. The advantage of the RAW format is that it contains much more data, in other words tiny details, which stand for greater image adjustability at a later stage when the data are submitted into a graphics editor; photos saved as JPEG or TIFF files can’t offer all the editing opportunities that come with a RAW file. If you are using RAW image acquisition, you can adjust parameters like white balance and ISO any time after the image has been saved. RAW files converted into JPEGs with a professional PC software suite provide much more detail than JPEGs created using the regular post-processing routine ran by your cell phone’s CPU after the moment of image acquisition. These algorithms, just like any other converters, rebuild the missing colors by applying a colored RGB filter to each cell of the matrix. After that, the resulting color of each pixel is calculated from the colors of neighboring matrix cells to which the filter was applied (this process is called RAW interpolation). An inevitable loss of data occurs when RAW files are converted into JPEGs, so there’s no way to rebuild a RAW from its JPEG descendant. Different compression levels stand for different amount of detail preserved in the final file and different filesize. Moderate compression makes an image appear as almost indistinguishable from the original RAW file to the human eye, especially after the picture gets resized and printed.

There’s no way to print RAW images directly, they look as black and white pictures although in fact use a 12-bit encoding. Here comes the weird discovery: Motorola ZN5 produces 8-bit raw images, and those are immediately saved in the memory as TIFF files. That’s why RAW is but a marketing slogan following ZN5 all the way long, while the handset can’t take any real RAW shots at all.

The TIFF file format is the result of compressing RAW data using a less cruel algorithm than JPEG employs, which results in compressed images with almost the same high level of detail preserved, which isn’t bad at all: you won’t find such a feature in any other phone no matter how hard you try. The images equally appear as black-and-white pictures, you must have a good command of PC graphics editing software to restore the colors. In comparison with the regular JPEGs, the level of detail is much higher, and the color palette is all up to you to play with and make adjustments.

After pressing the shoot button, you immediately get two versions of the same shot: a color JPEG and a TIFF created through lossless RAW compression. Such a file can normally be as large as 5 Mb. Optionally you can set the handset to take shots in so-called Binned RAW format, which is another kind of compressed RAW, though the quality suffers to an extent where it becomes impossible to use these data for quality post-processing in professional graphics editing software.

Below you will find pair of photos. The first from the lest is always the original lossless TIFF, the second one is an automatically generated JPEG made through the use of the patented Kodak algorithms applied to the data by the handset after the moment of shooting.

Video

The handset supports two resolutions for taking videos: 176x144 and 128x96. The framerate is a modest 15 fps, the maximum record length can be limited to fit the maximum MMS attachments size or set to unlimited, where you can shoot as