At Mobile World Congress Nokia laid down the gauntlet to itself with the launch of the PureView 808 boasting a whopping 41 megapixel digital camera.
Again using Carl Zeiss optics it seems hard to think there will be any camera phone that will be able to match it.
The Nokia PureView can capture stills with a 7728 x 5354 resolution in 16:9 format or 7152 x 5368 in 4:3.
For the rest of the device it comes in white. It isn’t the thinnest of smartphones but there’s a lot going on under the bonnet, and 41 megapixels has to come at a price somewhere.
On the back there’s a large lens for the camera and a Xenon flash above it.
On the front is the 4 inch touchscreen that measures 640 x 360. It’s powered by a 1.3 GHz processor and 16GB of memory, there’s a memory card slot to expand on that. There is also 512 MB of RAM.
Back to the camera, it has an f/2.4 aperture. The video offers a digital zoom without any loss of resolution.
1080p video is captured at 4x zoom and 720p at 6x zoom. Seven pixels can be turned into one.
This makes it easier to retain quality even when you zoom in and crop. The maximum you can get out of the PureView is 38 megapixels.
Looking at the numbers, obviously while the PureView is a good device, the screen resolution is too low to view the amount of detail you’ll be able to snap with the camera.
It may also struggle, potentially, to cope with huge images the camera will create: Much better to stash on a PC or other device.
Also in running a single core processor, with its main competitors running with a dual core or even quad core, is there going to be anything to attract anyone to the device other than the camera?
Is it more camera with phone attached rather than the other way around? The camera has already come into criticism from Olympus who want to test Nokia’s boats in a range of lighting conditions.
What will frustrate some users more is the fact that the PureView also runs Symbian, Nokia’s operating system.
Nokia has already said it’s phasing out the OS in favour of Windows Phone, seen on its Lumia range.
Symbian is not popular in the US meaning the device is likely to only get a UK and Europe launch.
Nokia says it has spent five years developing PureView technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment