Nokia has posted actual images that came from a prototype Lumia 920 on its Conversations Blog, but with all the controversy it wanted to show definitively that those photos were real. So we met Nokia at the same spot in Central Park where they were shot and took the same photos with the same device of the same Nokia engineer ourselves, along with a few others. Unfortunately, Nokia said that the software for taking video with OIS wasn't yet completed, so we weren't able to test that. In fact, if you look at the full images below, you'll note that the EXIF data on the Nokia 920 images are all wrong. This was most definitely a prototype. (Astute observers will note that it's not just Microsoft that has software work to finish so that the 920 can be released).

After getting that disappointment settled, we set out to take our shots, armed with the Nokia Lumia 920, Samsung Galaxy S III, iPhone 4S, HTC One X, Nokia Lumia 900, and Nokia 808 PureView. We shot images with and without flash and used the default Auto settings for most of the images — though on the One X and Galaxy S III we also tried a "night" mode (the images presented here are those without flash).

The results? The Lumia 920 takes very good low-light images, the OIS compensates for enough hand shake to take in light to create a photo in situations where you'd expect none are possible. In near darkness, we will say that it took a relatively steady hand to get a shot without camera shake — but that's a very small complaint. While we were getting blur on the 920, we were getting vastly darker and grainier images on the rest.

The Lumia 920 takes very good low-light images

As you can see in the gallery below, both the Galaxy S III and One X comported themselves slightly better when switching to night mode, but none of the cameras we tried took in as much light as the Lumia 920 with any combination of settings or flash. It wasn't in the same class as a shot taken with a DSLR, of course, but given the more diluted meaning of "PureView," we didn't expect it to be.

If we had to pick one complaint about the low-light performance from the Lumia 920's camera, it would be that the resulting image is almost too bright. Nokia could dial it back a bit, tweaking the software to keep the shutter open for a shorter period of time to reduce blur even more.