I was quite impressed they actually have a street view! Not sure which city you tried, but I just zoomed in on a random street in Helsinki, and it seems to be good enough to read some license plates (they might want to fix that).

Oh sure, I was impressed and surprised too. I was also impressed that it was WebGL rather than flash. That said - if you're going to spend a hell of a lot of money sending people into the streets of both major and minor cities - you might as well give them good cameras.

Yeah, image quality seems to be lower than in google streetview, but it also runs much smoother at least on my machine.

The streetview was made by Navteq using a Ladybug 3 camera, which is a pretty sad camera to use for this application. It is not very high resolution, it is intended more for panoramic video than for high resolution streetview-type capture. It also needs a ton of post production in order to look good.

FWIW, it's okay for me (London).

Central London - the imagery is horrendously low quality. Looks like camera tech from 6 years ago.

From 2006? Was camera technology really improved that much since then?

Absolutely it has. Resolution, noise, dynamic range have all improved dramatically since 2006. Compare the Canon 5d (1) from 2006 and the 5d Mk3 from this year - pretty decent comparison. It is no contest.

I just checked London, and quality is definitely subpar to Google's Street View