41 Megapixel in a Nokia 808 Pure View Phone?!

When my nerdy friend call me excitedly to tell me about the new Nokia 808 PureView smart phone, with FORTY MEGAPIXEL; I thought he has either gone mad or April Fool has come early!

A quick check at dpreview told me he is still saint and I am sure today is only February 28!

It is true that Nokia, after years of loosing out to Apple's formidable iPhone, did a coup and announced that it has created a 41MP smartphone, the Nokia 808 PureView.


To impress the world, especially all the 37 million iPhone users; Nokia has released  3 untouched JPEG images — the largest of which is a 5368×7152, 38-megapixel 10.3MB photograph!!

I found the quality VERY impressive, given that the shots were captured with a mobile phone!!

The bottom picture is a 100% crop of the one above.

Nokia trying to show their phone cam can produce nice out of focus bokeh, I feel this is a misleading shot; to achieve this effect, your phone lens has to be really close to your subject. Like any small sensor digi cam in day to day shots, it exhibit plenty of DOF!

 The exciting technology of this new Nokia phone is NOT about the humongous sensor, it is their new PureView pixel binning technology... Nokia has this to say:

"... feature our exclusive new PureView technology, which completely blows away any prior expectations about the quality of camera phone photography.
The Nokia 808 PureView features a 41-megapixel sensor with our highest performance Carl Zeiss optics to date and Nokia’s brand-new pixel oversampling technology."

"The technology means that taking typically sized shots (say, 5 megapixels) the camera can use oversampling to combine up to seven pixels into one “pure” pixel, eliminating the visual noise found on other mobile phone cameras. On top of that, you can zoom in up to 3X without losing any of the details in your shot – and there’s no artificially created pixels in your picture, either."

"Otherwise, you can use ‘Creative Shooting Mode’ to capture images at high resolution – 38 megapixels; then reframe, crop and zoom to find the best “picture within the picture” after the image has been shot and before saving it at convenient sizes for sharing and storage."

 As for video....

"The excellent camera performance also extends to video. The camera allows for 1080p recording at 30fps, with 4X lossless zoom thanks to the big sensor and powerful image processing which handles over 1 billion pixels per second. At lower resolutions, the capabilities of the zoom increase, with 6X at 720p and up to 12X lossless zoom in nHD (640 x 360) recordings. Of course great video is nothing without great audio.

Here the Nokia 808 PureView also sets a new standard. The Nokia 808 PureView is the world’s first video recording device to allow recording without distortion at audio levels beyond the capability of human hearing. This allows you to even in the harshest of environment capture stereo CD-like audio quality!"



After informing the world of the bells and whistles in their new phone, Nokia said...  what do you know ;)

It’s also a smartphone!

Outside the camera, it’s also a great smartphone, of course! Inside, it’s got the latest Nokia Belle operating system with Feature Pack 1 enhancements. These enhancements allow improved performance, personalisation and entertainment options, with a new browser, the latest Nokia Maps and an improved notifications bar.

One other great new feature is that the phone can deliver content recorded in surround sound to any stereo headphones, using technology from Dolby.

The screen is a four-inch, ClearBlack AMOLED display underneath Gorilla Glass, allowing for a big clear view of what’s going on, under any lighting conditions. Inside, there’s a 1.3GHz processor to keep everything humming. There’s 16GB of internal user memory, with support for MicroSD cards up to 32GB to contain all the pictures and video you’ll be shooting.

The device is remarkably pocket able considering how much there is inside. It’s only slightly larger than the Nokia N8 while the total weight, including the battery, is 169g. Talk time (over a 3G network) is rated at 6.5 hours, with a standby time of up to 540 hours.

UPDATE: Want to know more about how PureView technology works? Download the white paper.

UPDATE #2: Check out some unretouched photographs straight from the Nokia 808 PureView. (WARNING: it’s a hefty download!)

Diagram showing the size of the Nokia 808 PureView's 1/1.2" sensor in comparison to micro 4/3 camera and the Nikon 1 camera with their new CX format. 






Footnote:  You got to read this!!

The Inside Story of Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Camera Phone: Five Years in the Making  by Ina Fried