Now that 8-megapixel smartphones cameras are starting to become pedestrian, Nokia – a company that has always celebrated the quality of its smartphone cams – has had to step up its game. And what a step it has taken. On Monday, the company shocked Mobile World Congress audiences by announcing that the upcoming Nokia PureView 808 will boast a 41-megapixel camera.
If that sounds a little over the top, it probably should, but Nokia insists that number includes no artificially generated pixels or interpolation. How did engineers pull it off? The technology remains hazy, but the two Nokia engineers who developed the sensor were inspired by the technology used in satellite imaging, and have been concocting it in complete secrecy for five years.
Since 41-megapixel images won’t make sense for most people, the PureView will perform “pixel oversampling” to combine seven pixels into one, distilling full-res images down to 5-megapixel images with no noise.
Hazy technology or not, demo photos proved impressive. A massive, wall-sized mural within the Nokia booth was shot on the new camera, and looked every bit as sharp as what you might typically expect from a DSLR. Another example showed a man standing in front of a newsstand holding a paper, which you could zoom in on enough to clearly read individual headlines. Part of the reason Nokia developed the technology was as an alternative to optical zoom, which just hasn’t proven practical on smartphones. Of course, even with all the resolution in the world, we wouldn’t expect low-light performance to shine from a sensor that can fit in a smartphone, and none of the demo shots highlighted that capability.
Oddly enough, rather than choosing to introducing the new camera tech on a Windows Phone device, the PureView 808 will actually run Symbian. Aside from the crazy rear camera, specs include a single-core 1.3GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM and HSPA 14.4Mbps capability. Shockingly for a phone that can capture 41 megapixels, it only comes with 16GB of built-in storage (though you can add more via microSD) and the 4-inch screen only offers 640 x 360 resolution.
Nokia will introduce the PureView 808 in May priced at 450 euros, or $599 in the US. While the Symbian operating system may keep all but the most determined photographers away, Nokia assures us that the same technology is headed to other platforms soon.
dtz xtremely 1daful…cnt w8 2 c dt.
The file size for those pictures actually gets down to around 5MP. The huge sensor and some fancy software make it so that the quality of 41MP is displayed in the space of a 5MP picture.
noo mobile brand will every get to that level of pixels, not in 2/3yrs if not 4yrs coz N8 with 12pm held the title since 2010 as the best camera phone everrrrrr and it’s successor is a killer indeed… Carl Zeiss. LG and Fujitsu thought they would hold the title by giving us 16mp but that’s in the past for Nokia…41mb… ;-)
i have been waiting for cameras to improve on mobile devices. they have been stuck on 8MP now for a while. I know MP’s in a camera don’t mean everything but this is a step in the right direction
ITS A TRAP!
The zoom option sounds great.
@Eric Paul Hyatt, that’s why Nokia uses Carl Zeiss(if only he was alive to witness his technology, ahhh germans.).
sounds extremly gimicky, i mean the sample photo looks terrible…resolution does not determine quality, size of image sensor, lenses, compression formats all have a lot more to do with it
Wow, prob 14 Mbs per pic but this blows any competition right out of the water
How much memory would one picture take up?
I don’t know that I want my picture taken with that many megapixals!
Its actually only 38
This really just seems over the top. That camera bump on the back of the phone just looks massive, I can’t wait to see just how big it really is. It also confuses me why Nokia would make another Symbian phone after saying it would focus on WP7. I’m assuming they couldn’t figure out how to put PureView on a WP7.