I have personally tested the Nokia N97's camera myself and found that the video quality was okay but the zoom was terrible. It was choppy and the quality dropped horribly. Check out this video comparison between the Nokia N97 and the Nokia N8.
The video comparison takes the devices facing off indoors and have their digital zoom tested against each others.
- Greater depth of field on the N8 (N97 – ridiculously close though not as bad as 5800). Notice how much more of the "scene" is visible.
- No autofocus on N97 but this active-hyperfocal focusing of N8 means pretty much everything is in focus except the closer macro ranges (I think about 50-60CM is blurry on N97, not that good for self-held vlogs).
- N8 much better with this low-ish indoor lighting.
- Check out the usable digital zoom with the N8. On the N97 you can see all it does is ENLARGE the pixels hence blockiness.
- Zooming is also frighteningly choppy on the N97. I did complain before that we don't have smooth zooming (as seen in ancient 6630) but compared to N97 N8 zooms like butter.
- File size of the N8 video is 4x the N97, 40MB vs 10MB. Well there are 4x the pixels. Note, comparable files from say, Samsung Pixon 12 are MUCH larger.
Make sure you click 720p for N8 and 360p for N97.
Nokia N97
Nokia N8
source - MyNokiaBlog