We came in to these testing scenarios with exceedingly high expectations, and in the extremely low-light situations, where most phones fall flat on their face, the Lumia 920 indeed hit its stride. Yes, there was often some ISO noise to be seen and the results weren't always spectacular, but the 920's low-light shots were always the best of the bunch. Images were blur-free and reasonably clear, a definite improvement from the frequent messy quality induced by longer shutter times in the other cameras. Everything from contrast to color reproduction in low light imagery was truly superior in the 920 to any other shooter we sampled it against, living up to Nokia's claims on that front.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for daytime photography. Here the tables were often turned, with the 920 frequently producing shots that were subtly soft. [...]
That's not to say the daytime images looked bad, necessarily -- in fact they generally looked reasonably good. But in this case, the Lumia 920 failed to consistently deliver images that beat the rest. In fact, it was often the 920 that ranked mid-pack compared to the heavy-hitters we listed earlier. Another minor complaint was the while balance, often off in cloudy conditions outdoors (the 808 PureView had similar issues with fluorescents indoors), left some of our shots with a yellowish tinge -- the manual settings did remedy this, however. [...]
We also found that the Lumia had difficulty metering the scenes we presented. We often had to decide between capturing a detailed skyline or a well-lit subject. An HDR mode certainly wouldn't go amiss. Admittedly, the low-light performance , as we'd already teased, beat everything else outright, but that performance has somehow cost your well-lit images a degree of detail you might not want to give up. We suggest take a look through our image gallery -- we were sure to run the camera phone through as many different environments as we could; noise artifacts are low (again, especially in low light) and file sizes suggests that Nokia haven't compressed much away. But we can't fight our disappointment with these results; after all that fanfare, the all-round imaging performance still leaves something to be desired.