Nokia PureView 41 Megapixel camera phone!
Feb. 28 2012
Yesterday I read some articles coming out of the Barcelona Mobile World Congress 2012. An astonishing announcement from Nokia caught my eye. Not believing what I was reading I decided not to write about it until I had more information. Well a lot happens in one day. The Nokia PureView 808 mobile phone with a Carl Zeiss F 2.4 lens and a 41 Mpix sensor is a great leap forward in this category. The press release can be found HERE. Nokia has released the white paper found HERE as well as some images uploaded to GigaPan by Engadget HERE. Zoom in and be amazed! What I find very interesting is the wide aperture of f2.4 and how that gives such a nice bokeh-shallow depth of field. Very noticeable with the close up image of the climbing carabiner. I could go on with details but if your inclined to know more read the white paper as linked above. From a professional stand point, this could be another tool in the camera bag as not only a back up but it may prove to be a great tool for photojournalists who need a little more stealth. The focal length of 8.02 mm equivalent to 28mm on a 4:3 aspect ratio like a Micro Four Thirds system is good but may not be wide enough for some. The opticle format is 1/1.2 according to the white paper and that relates to a 14mm diagonal measurement of the physical sensor. About 3x the area of my Samsung Galaxy SII I wrote about HERE. The zoom function of this camera is also unique. The camera uses pixel oversampling in its different image settings. The default is 5 Mpix ( it has 5, 8 and 38 Mpix settings) and using this setting allows for a 3x zoom. The zoom function stops when the pixels are no longer oversampled. For instance using the 5 Mpix setting the image uses the entire sensor and as you zoom in you are selecting the relative area of the sensor. Zoom will stop when you reach 1:1 for the input and output resolution. So when you are shooting at its highest image setting of 38 Mpix there is no zooming . The oversampling does work very well when viewing an image shot at 5 Mpix because it is actually using the entire height of the sensor and uses more pixels for Red, Green and Blue. Nokia claims to use true R,G,B colours which is 24 bpp ( bits per pixel) having 16.8 million colours. There are many quality questions I have about this phone such as lens flare and chromatic aberration but this wil come to light when it is released at around the $600 range.
On a final note. Why has Nokia released this phone using its Symbian OS? I thought that Symbian OS had been abandoned when Nokia signed up with Microsoft and uses Windows Phone 8 now. Odd.
808 sensor diagram from Nokia white paper
Nokia PureView 808 sample