Nokia 1020 (the smartphone with the 41 MP camera)

[Steve]

This has been rumoured to be coming for a while and Nokia finally announced it earlier in the week.

 

http://i.imgur.com/JrRuZxH.jpg

 

There's a slight bulge where the camera is, but it's still only just over 10mm thick at its thickest point, so that's pretty good considering.

 

Here's a pic taken with the camera at full resolution: -

 

http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/large-sensor-city-view.jpg

 

Pretty impressive!

 

It uses oversampling to create a 5 MP version of any photo you take for sharing purposes, as obviously you wouldn't want to be trying to upload 41 MP photos to Instagram and Facebook. Doing that means you get far less noise in the resulting 5 MP photo than you would if it was taken with a 5 MP camera to begin with. It also has a pretty cool photo editor built in, including the ability to manually rotate a photo and crop a section of it out.

 

It's not the phone for me, but if having the best camera you can get in a phone is something you want - without it being one of those hybrid camera/phones that is camera-shaped and bulky - then this could definitely be worth a look.

[Dan]

I was interested in this phone because of the camera but after looking at that photo I'm not!

[Steve]

Huh?

[Dan]

The quality of the sample photo you posted it's crap, I expect much better from the sensor.

[Steve]

Did you look at the same image as me? Did you let it fully load, as it's over 13MB in size?

 

Here's what the image looks like on my 27" monitor. It's about 4 times too big to fit on my screen though, so this is zoomed way out so the full image fits on screen, plus obviously I have compressed it to under 2MB as well: -

 

http://i.imgur.com/whnsatl.jpg

 

I dunno how you can call the quality of that "crap"!

[Chris]

I agree with Dan, the 41MP is just marketing bollocks because it looks like a 10MP image blown up. The sensor is still only 1/1.5in, which is why it doesn't have the clarity to make each pixel count - essentially it's exactly the same as the 808 with four pixels where there was once one, but pretty much exactly the same information in them.

[Steve]

Hmmmm, I think you guys have lost your minds if you don't think that pic is good quality. It's WAY better than your phones are capable of (mine too).

[Dan]

I agree with Dan, the 41MP is just marketing bollocks because it looks like a 10MP image blown up. The sensor is still only 1/1.5in, which is why it doesn't have the clarity to make each pixel count - essentially it's exactly the same as the 808 with four pixels where there was once one, but pretty much exactly the same information in them.

 

Exactly!

 

Hmmmm, I think you guys have lost your minds if you don't think that pic is good quality. It's WAY better than your phones are capable of (mine too).

 

Zoomed out it's doesn't look to bad but full size it looks like any other mobile phone photo and it's very fuzzy. 41 megapixels is useless look at the high end Canons, they top out around 20 megapixels but they have really good (and big) sensors. Nokia haven't done enough with the sensor.

[mattnice]

Mentals

[Steve]

iMentals

[Chris]

you've accepted quite a lot of nonsense by unscrupulous marketeers here steve - trust me and dan on this. for instance the bit about the 41mp image being shrunk to 5mb giving a less noisy picture than a 5mp shot in the first place is just rubbish.

 

amount of pixels in the final image does not a good determiner of camera quality make.

[Steve]

I trust my own eyesight. I'm fully aware that more MP doesn't necessarily mean better quality.

 

As for downsampling, I would suggest you go and read up on that.

[Chris]

I'm not trying to piss on your barbecue here mate, if it looks great to you then fantastic. it's a good, sharp camera by the looks of things... just not at 41mp. essentially you're looking at a 10mp-ish image on your monitor there.

 

regarding downsampling, you have to double everything for a true benefit to the original oversample - sensor size:pixel count ratio being equal then yes, you will get a better picture. the reduction of quantisation error is a better benefit here, I imagine.

 

there are advantages to a lower res sensor in the first place in dynamic range and light sensitivity and those things can allow you to work the sensor less hard, helping with noise. squeezing so many pixels into a small sensor works it so much harder that noise is more likely in the pixels. perhaps if there's appreciably lower noise ratio there'd be a strong case for it, but it's down to whether the higher propensity for noise beats out the lower res by the ratio you're downsampling by. that'd be an interesting comparison, but I doubt it would yield much fruit...

[Steve]

I never once said that "more MP = better image quality", but you jumped in saying that I have "accepted a lot of nonsense from unscrupulous marketeers". What's the "lot of nonsense" I have accepted? That downsampling from resolution A to resolution B can lead to a better quality images than if they were shot at resolution B to begin with? Cos it's you that's talking nonsense there.

 

This is what the guy in charge of Nokia's camera tech said on Twitter about the 41 MP camera in the 808 - pay attention to the final tweet specifically: -

 

http://i.imgur.com/9WUj10J.jpg

 

But yeah - what an unscrupulous marketeer that guy is!

 

In traditional imaging systems, the true resolution of the system is lower than that of the nominal sensor resolution. The traditional camera sensor resolution may be 5MP, but it does not really capture photos that have five million pixels of independent data. The data is spread across multiple pixels causing, for example, blurring and artifacts. There are two technical reasons for this: one is related to the optics design and aliasing, and the other to the way the sensor samples the data with Bayer colour filters. A traditional 5MP camera has only 2.5 million green pixels and 1.25 million red and blue pixels for example. See Figure 3 for a comparison in sharpness of a standard 5MP image versus an oversampled 5MP image and Figure 4 for an illustration of how oversampling reduces noise compared with a standard sensor.

 

The oversampling technology in the Lumia 1020 makes it possible to solve both of these issues, and enables full details to be captured with the 5MP image, visible as amazing sharpness, naturalness and low noise. It is physically impossible to capture this with a traditional 5MP camera.

http://i.imgur.com/3aqG8ST.jpg

 

http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/2723846/data/1/-/Lumia1020-whitepaper.pdf

 

It should also be noted that the pic you were looking at above is the "full resolution" image, not one that takes advantage of downsampling.

 

Some PC gamers use downsampling to achieve higher image quality. They force the game to render the image at a higher resolution than their screen supports, then it's downsampled to the resolution of their screen resulting in a noticeably sharper image with fewer "jaggies".

[Chris]

Okay mate fine