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Topic: Smartphones

MWC 2012: Nokia announces 808 PureView with 41 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera

Summary: Nokia leads with high end camera smartphones and continues this trend with the Nokia 808 PureView that has a 41 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics.

Matthew Miller

By for Smartphones and Cell Phones |

I had to read the news on the Nokia 808 PureView a couple of times because I just couldn't believe the 41 megapixel specification that I read. Previously, the Nokia N8 ruled the smartphone world with a 12 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera so I was surprised by the huge jump to 41 megapixels.

The Nokia PureView uses their new PureView technology, which is explained on the Nokia Conversations site as:

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.

The Nokia PureView also offers enhanced video performance with 1080p video recording at 30 fps with 4x lossless zoom. Audio enhancements include recording of audio at levels as high as 140db.

The upcoming Nokia 808 PureView is a Symbian Belle smartphone so it likely won't appeal much to those using Android and iOS devices, but if you honestly give this latest version of Symbian a chance I think you will see it is really not that much different (in terms of the UI) than Android. The Nokia 808 PureView has a 4 inch ClearBlack AMOLED display, 1.3 GHz processor, and 16GB internal memory with support for microSD expansion.

Topics: Smartphones, Hardware, Mobility, Nokia

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24 comments
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  • Why not on Windows Phone?!

    Why on Symbian?! That's PUREly not right from my point of VIEW. ;-)
    e_mendz
    Reply Vote

    • Nothing Wrong with Symbian

      I have a N8 with Symbian Belle. A few quirks, but nothing wrong with it--can do as much as iPhone & Android. Symbian Anna was good too. Of course I am more of a business user than phone game player.
      Backbutton
      Reply Vote

    • Nokia will offer it later

      I am sure that at some point in the future the hardware will be adjusted for MS requirements for WP 7.5 or 8.0.
      rmark@...
      Reply Vote

  • Looks interesting

    Looks interesting from a camera perspective but it is kind of funny that they're not using Windows Phone for this... Is somebody at Nokia starting to feel the weight of choosing Windows Phone as their primary smartphone OS?
    slickjim
    Reply Vote

    • Molon Labe

      I predicted that we would start seeing stuff like this because of the way Elop organized the company after announcing the Microsoft deal. Instead of "Nokia," there was suddenly a "smartphone division" and a "feature phone division." The party line was that the smartphone division would make the Windows Phone devices and represented the future of the company. The goal of the feature phone division was to hold the fort and keep the company alive during the transition.

      Well, nobody wants to be part of a doomed "hold the fort" exercise. The people sent to work on feature phones have some pride. So we can bet that they are pulling every trick in the book to expand their charter upwards toward more powerful devices, and preparing all sorts of "under the bench" projects to Save The Company in the event that Elop and WP don't work out as planned. (In fact to not have that would be insane in a company that size).

      It won't surprise me if Nokia's "feature phone" division is caught testing an Android device. Don't they owe it to the shareholders? Just in case?
      Robert Hahn
      Reply Vote

    • Nokia better stick with Symbian

      Nokia already gave enough to Microsoft. They are better sticking with Symbian for their better products and this is one good example. Symbian is as much, or better for a mobile phone than WP.

      If there is someone sane left at Nokia, they would stay away from Android.
      danbi
      Reply Vote

  • MWC 2012: Nokia announces 808 PureView with 41 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera

    I wonder what the size of a 41 megapixel picture would be. You are going to need a decent sized memory card.
    Loverock Davidson-
    Reply Vote

    • RTFA anyone?

      Wow, just wow. It has always been clear that you don't bother to really read the articles you comment on, but this one was not even three full paragraphs. Had you bothered to RTFA, you'd have seen that the camera does NOT save the full 41MP image, but uses the extra data for processing, and down-samples to save.
      .DeusExMachina.
      Reply Vote

      • Crap compared to a proper camera

        Gonna be crap compared to a proper camera.

        sensor size, aperture, optical super-zoom ?
        neil.postlethwaite@...
        Reply Vote

  • Optical Zoom

    It is kind of an interesting way of trying to mitigate the need for an optical zoom on a mobile phone.
    Bluelude1
    Reply Vote

    • Aha! You see the future!

      In my book, "How To Use The Digital Camera You Just Bought," I talk about future cameras having such high resolution that mechanical zooming will go away. When you hit 100 MP, you can crop a lot! Also, when ISOs hit a half million, those F/ 5.6 lenses will finally be able to shoot indoor sports shots of little Johnny scoring a point with little or no subject movement.
      psion@...
      Reply Vote

    • No substitute for optical zoom

      Interesting spin on it, but can't escape the fact you can't mitigate this.
      neil.postlethwaite@...
      Reply Vote

      • its been done

        How does the human eye 'zoom'?

        In fact, the human eye has huge number of 'megapixels' -- so huge that our brains cannot comprehend that much (in detail) - so if you have to look at the entire picture, you get just that -- an overview. So when you want to 'zoom' in, you in fact simply restrict yourself to portion of what your eyes see and this 'focusing' reveals much more details. Not much different from what this camera proposes to do.

        What is interesting is that such a number of megapixels requires a lot of bandwidth to pass from the sensor to the CPU...
        danbi
        Reply Vote

  • cool

    very intersting
    http://hydro-carbons.blogspot.in/
    msd23
    Reply Vote

  • What ??

    Now that is just stupid ..
    Next we will see wings and jet engines on cars ..

    As SNL says .. Really ??
    CND-Dude
    Reply Vote

    • How do you mean "What ??"

      Why is it stupid? Please explain?
      Gangleri
      Reply Vote

  • focal length nits

    One problem I find with this phone's camera is that the reported sensor size and lens focal length leads to the conclusion that the lens has the approximate field of view of a 25mm wide angle lens on a 35mm full frame camera. That, folks, is a rather wide angle lens. The sort of lens that makes little Johnny across that table blowing out his birthday candles look distant.

    Then we can wander off into the resolution of the lens -- it's f2.4 aperture allows about 3 times the light to hit the sensor compared to a f5.6 lens. Nice for low light. OTOH, given the sensor size of ~81 square mm, we're going to need a lens capable of resolving 350 line pairs per millimeter to take advantage of the sensor's full capability. While a fixed aperture, fixed focal length lens has the advantage here, the nasty formula for maximum resolution for the diffraction limited case suggests that this lens will not achieve that number even assuming that the lens itself is of high enough quality.
    DNSB
    Reply Vote

    • resolution indeed

      If you do not have to produce that many megapixel final picture, having many megapixels to play with can be hugely successful (providing you have the computing power and the algorithms for that). You could work to reduce effects of such 'law of physics' things like color aberrations and even diffraction limits - as both can be calculated and compensated for given enough samples.
      danbi
      Reply Vote

  • Symbian could have been the future

    The Symbian OS has been on the market for, what, 8 years? It performs extremely well on low (as compared to current high speed, multi core cell phones) spec phones, and has a huge application infrastructure in place. How did Android manage to take the lead?
    In my, humble, opinion, it should have been open sourced years ago, and left that way.
    Just saying....
    LaMorte
    Reply Vote

    • Symbian should have been retired yers ago

      Because it's outdated and fiddly like WinMo was, and Blackberry still is until BBX gets out the door. Just a shame Nokia took Microsoft's 30 pieces of silver, and junked the promising Key Differentiator of MeeGo, in partnership with Intel.
      neil.postlethwaite@...
      Reply Vote
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