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NOKIA HAS UNVEILED a new smartphone with a 41-megapixel resolution camera – far higher than anything offered by its competitors.
The Nokia 808 PureView, which the company showed today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, will take photos at a resolution five times that offered by the iPhone 4S with its humble 8-megapixel sensor.
And it’s far higher even than many dedicated SLR cameras, with consumer-grade offerings from Canon and Nikon mostly around the 10-12 megapixel mark. Of course, higher megapixels are no guarantee of quality.
And it’s not quite that simple. According to the company website the PureView will use “over-sampling” technology to produce images which actually have an effective resolution of five megapixels – but somehow incorporate data from the larger image.
It claims this also means users can zoom in up to 3x without sacrificing resolution, unlike most smartphone cameras.
The results are “very impressive”, according to the Wall Street Journal, which notes “extremely sharp” images and “crystal clear detail”.
Images on the Nokia site appear to show a handset that looks thicker than competitors including the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy 2, presumably to accommodate the lens and sensor. The phone will be available from May and cost around €450, according to the Guardian.
This video from Nokia’s channel shows the phone in action:
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Mega pixel arms race….pointless without a good lens;
The Carl Zeiss len in the Nokia have been brilliant compared to the many other manufactures lens over the years. This may be the same as they made the unit considerable bulky to fit it in.
Well said – if you had a billion mega pixels, and the lens is crap – your image is still crap.
Yay for 25mb photos of half filled pint glasses
After around 14+ megapixels doesn’t (from what I have read previously) the human eye not be able to detect any further differentiation between that resolution and something much higher?
Those in the graphics arts and photography business, etc, along with their Photoshop etc, might appreciate this phone but at the end of the day, those in that same business will have more dedicated professional camera(s) anyway if they need to be taking shots of such high resolution.
The phone would be handy for light carrying around at leisure times but I suspect that for actual professional shoots, its others functions such as iso ranges and filtering, would be very limited.
Nice to have but I would pass on it myself for a more professional camera at that opening on sale price.
Not quite the purpose, I do agree that technically 8 megapixels is the limit, but phones only use digital zoom so when you’re zooming you’re megapixel rating shoots down. So the higher you start the farther you can go. Also the also have a huge physical sensor in this phone.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure its a very decent phone and light camera which takes good pictures for the average citizen.
Nice to see – but I wish they make these things a bit cheaper. They might even sell more of them then.
Even I might be tempted to try one out…
@Unitedpeople Ireland
The Nokias as usually very competitivelt priced, certainly cheaper than iphone. €450 is the straight sale price; I would expect it to be less than half via vodafone etc
*competitively even
Can you make calls, send a text and play angry birds? That’s what’s really important. 41 mp to take a duck faced pose in the toilets is overkill
Haha – I was wondering what you could call those ‘pouty’ pics that girls love to take in pub bogs! Duck faced! Brilliant!
Sigh** Good luck trying to take any decent photos were there is not much visible light.
The size of the sensor is tiny so each of the pixels are going to be tiny, thus increasing the signal/noise ratio.
The end result is lots of noisy images
A bigger and better camera,too little to late,the I phone is the new daddy. End of.
The Iphone is the latest new (too?) expensive accessory!
not with that 4s battery its not, brought mine back
Far from it. iPhone may have been the daddy (debatable) but Samsung/HTC phones have closed the gap and Nokia have made huge strides in the past 12 months with the N9, Lumia 800 & now the Pureview808.
Many ppl are now ditching iphone in favour of android phones. IPhones are still very expensive and now there are better, cheaper options. If I was buying a new phone iphone wouldn’t make my list at all.
There was a recent report out that did indeed show that Android phones and namely Samsung’s, were out selling the iPhone.
The main advantage of this camera will be a lossless 3x digital zoom. This is a big advance.
Is this the story i mailed you guys about?
nokia have stole the show at mwc with this amazing device,its a kick in the ass for other manufacturers..
Has anyone seen the Galaxy Beam? Now that’s what I call a step forward.
If I wanted a 41MP camera, I’d go out and buy a camera.
This phone will be running nokias own symbian system. Lol. Good luck with that. No thanks.
What do people have against Symbian? When have you even tried it last?
“Of course, higher megapixels are no guarantee of quality.” I won’t be giving up my Canon any time soon.
It’s a phone. It’s not meant to replace DSLRs.
Yeah, It’s a Nokia phone after all so I wouldn’t expect much.
@Patrick
Why?? Nokia have always built solid phones and have always been top techwise.
EM, worked in phones four years… got more Nokia back than any other handset with issues…more so their phones marketed as smart phones even though we sold less of them compared to other oems
I’m quite impressed with Nokia Belle since they upgraded my N8 software to it. I like Nokia but will reserve judgement on this one till I know more. I like a decent camera on my phone, but other things are important too – like clarity of text etc for us oldies who don’t have the best eyesight.
Same here; like Belle. It’s close to Android at this stage.
It’s a Nokia, so people over 50 can take better pics.
i.e. better pics than iphone users for example ;)
A 41MP camera on a phone ? Nokia have now jumped the shark completely
How many megapixels is your eye?
Answer me that why don’t ya?
If a new camera is the feature they are going to plug and not tell us anything about the phone itself they will fall on their arse. Stephen O’Connell’s comment is correct.
Nokia are out of the race, they just haven’t accepted it yet. The new Samsung beam looks great. But it will take more than a built in dlp projector to take me away from my iPhone
The N8 was their previous big camera phone and sold well for this. This will also sell well. Many people actually want good cameras in their phones. To say Nokia is out of the race is nonsense when you see what they have brought out in recent times.
This is not just MP for the sake of MP. I am sure that the engineers at Nokia are intelligent enough to realise that MP alone does not a good picture make. A supersampling approach would basically increase sharpness of the image, while decreasing noise. It’s used in graphics output as well and is perfectly valid.
Looking forward to looking at the results… if it is true that they are using Symbian instead of WP7 then that is a real disappointment.
@Dennis
Using Nokia Belle. Belle is decent imho and further updates are planned.
have your say