Okay. This mobile phone from Nokia, the Finnish former leader of the mobile space, is perhaps the biggest technological innovation since Apple revolutionised the touch-screen with their iOS devices in 2007. Nokia have been known for their engineering and build quality, from mobile phones that last for eternity (see the picture captioned 3210) to mobile phones that set benchmarks across the board, namely the N8. Now, there is a new bow in town. And he has 41 mega-pixels in his behind.
Nokia 3210: Who remembers this 1999 badboy?
You read that right. Nokia have created a digital camera inside of a phone with a massive 41 megapixel sensor. Just to put that into perspective, let’s compare this. The iPhone 4S claimed to be one of the leaders in mobile photography, contrary to what you’ll see by people playing with Instagram. Canon’s DSLR cameras – those chunky bangers that pros use – capture around 20MP still photos. What on earth do you do with 41 usable pixels?
Now, the answer to that question is actually quite clever. Think about this. If you’re really far away from your subject – you bought the cheap tickets to a gig – then you’ll obviously want to zoom in. Except, on phones, as you zoom in the quality decreases – it up scales pixels and looks like a dodgy picture you pulled off of Google. Now, Nokia have created this PureView technology that allows for 4X Lossless zoom at 5MP by using oversampling – With zoom off it crams 7 pixels into one to make a really vivid, sharp image compared to the noisier, grainier ones that even the iPhone produces in lower light. And, once it’s run out of pixels to work with, it doesn’t zoom any further. The phone never up scales pixels, only over samples. And, if for whatever reason you want to get full size images you can save 34MP widescreen shots or 38MP 4:3 (squarish) shots.
And, this works in video mode too. You can shoot in 1080P and still zoom in 3X without degradation of quality.
Pixels aren’t everything, as many people will tell you with images, and as mentioned above the benchmark used to be the 12MP N8. But the clarity of pictures is immense. It is fantastic in low light as well as full brightness and focuses like a DSLR with no real working parks, allowing for silent operation. And, to top it all off it still functions as an actual phone. It functions really well in fact. The phone is easily customisable and straightforward. I reckon it is severely underrated, in fact.
And on that note, here’s some material for you to look at and make decisions on. Bear in mind that this phone is similarly priced to other smartphones on the market. Leave any comments and questions below – they will be answered, I promise.
http://europe.nokia.com/pureview
BED Magazine 