Nokia 808: A Medium Format Wannabe?

nokia-808

The new Nokia 808 PureView smartphone boasts 41-megapixels in a tiny 1/1.2-inch image sensor. While that is 1.5 times larger than the 1/1.83-inch sensor in the Nokia N8, how can it cram 41-million pixels in minuscule real estate and claim good image quality?

The answer, Nokia says, is pixel oversampling. It works this way: pixel oversampling combines many pixels to create a single (super) pixel. When this happens, you keep virtually all the detail, but filter away visual noise from the image. The speckled, grainy look you tend to get in low-lighting conditions is greatly reduced. And in good light, visual noise is virtually non-existent, which means the images you can take are more natural and beautiful than ever. They are purer, perhaps a more accurate representation of the original subject than has ever been achieved before, according to Nokia.

Is this balderdash? We’ll wait for what the pixel-peepers have to say about that. But for now, the Nokia 808 also boasts highest performance Carl Zeiss optics with lossless zoom: 3x for stills, 4x for full HD 1080p video. And of course, this is still a very good smartphone.

This new Nokia 808 is so bad, this photographer just might end up with one.

[Site: Nokia 808 White Paper, PDF 608KB]

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.