Microsoft Lumia 950 review – Windows 10 comes to mobiles

Display

Thankfully, the Lumia 950 makes up for its somewhat bland design with a 5.2in, 2,560×1,440 AMOLED display. This really makes Windows 10’s refreshed Live Tile interface jump out of the screen, delivering perfect 0.00cd/m2 blacks for the notification bar and settings options. Colour accuracy is also very high, covering 99.6% of the sRGB colour gamut, and its infinity:1 contrast ratio helps images look absolutely stunning.

The only downside is a low peak brightness of just 297.21cd/m2. AMOLED screens are often dimmer than LCD displays, but even this is pretty poor compared to other AMOLED panels I’ve tested. This is just about enough to see the screen clearly outside, but overhead lights or bright sunshine play havoc with its visibility, even when brightness is set to max.

Camera

The Lumia 950’s redeeming feature is its 20-megapixel rear camera. It’s so good that it’s almost worth the price of admission alone. With a PureView Zeiss lens, f/1.9 aperture and optical image stabilisation, the Lumia 950 produced excellent shots regardless of lighting conditions. Both inside and out, detail levels were high across the entire frame and exposure levels were superb. Contrast levels were easily as high as the iPhone 6s, but with the same, pleasing neutral colour palette of the Nexus 5X.

^ Everything is in focus, there’s hardly any noise, everything is exposed correctly and colours are lovely and neutral

Low light photography is equally excellent. Whether I had our external lamp turned on or off, the Lumia 950 produced stunning photos, showing plenty of detail, rich, vibrant colours and hardly any noise to speak of. Its triple LED flash also produces beautifully clean images, maintaining an accurate colour balance without making lighter objects appear green or blue.

Even better, the camera roll app lets you manually choose the best lighting conditions for each photo you take with a flash, letting you pick from a wide range of exposures via an onscreen slider. You probably won’t need to use it that often when the flash is so good in the first place, but it’s still a brilliant tool to have if you’re not particularly pleased with the end result.

^ With our lamp turned on, photos looked stunning. The fur on our teddy bear is bristling with detail and colours are lovely and rich

^ Even in low light with our lamp turned off, noise was relatively low and there was still an impressive level of detail present

The front 5-megapixel camera can also capture short seconds-long video clips, which are very similar to Live Photos on the iPhone 6s, but don’t capture any sound. However, they’re arguably more flexible than those on the iPhone 6s, as you can select and save any frame you like rather than relying on the software to select the best ones for you.

Conclusion

As a whole, Microsoft’s Lumia 950 is a very mixed bag. Its camera and Windows 10 Continuum are fantastic, but day-to-day performance, battery life and low screen brightness just aren’t quite good enough to warrant a whole-hearted recommendation. This is a real shame, as there’s clearly a lot of potential here, but when it costs £420 SIM-free or £32-per-month on a contract, you’re paying a lot for something that doesn’t feel nearly as slick as its Android rivals.