The camera phone game changer

Camera quality is a competitive area for the current crop of smartphones. With each new device, the gap between phones that happen to have cameras, and actual point-and-shoot cameras, shrinks. There is a phrase which comes to mind, adapted to say "one small step for Nokia, one giant leap for mobile camera technology." While most high-end smartphones feature 5-megapixel or 8-megapixel cameras, Nokia's new PureView packs a whopping 41-megapixel camera. Nokia took five years to develop PureView technology on its Symbian platform. The four-inch phone with a resolution of 640x360 pixels will be available in the Gulf with a price tag of $600 (Dh2,200) in the second quarter. Vesa Jutila, head of smartphone product marketing (smart devices) at Nokia, told Gulf News that PureView uses 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, the new technology can zoom in up to 3x without losing any of the detail in your shot, and 4x zoom in full HD 1080p. For 720p HD video, you're looking at 6x lossless zoom. And for (640x360) video, an amazing 12x zoom. The starting point is a super-high-resolution 1.2-inch image sensor (5x larger than rival smartphones). This has an active area of 7,728 x 5368 pixels, totaling 41-megapixel. Depending on the aspect ratio you choose, it will use 7,728 x 4,354 pixels for 16:9 images/videos, or 7,152 x 5,368 pixels for 4:3 images/videos. What happens next depends on the settings and whether or not you're using zoom. But to give you an idea, he said the default still image setting is 5-megapixel at 16:9, and for video it's 1080p at 30fps. "Even digital SLR images have certain softness. With oversampling, however, images can be noise free, yet incredibly detailed and defined," he said. "Zoom into the 5-megapixel images at 100 per cent magnification on your PC screen, and you'll see. There's something beautifully pure about the detail — not enhanced in anyway," he added. With the Nokia 808 PureView, you get effective maximum aperture throughout the zoom range. Whereas with optical zoom, he said less light tends to reach the sensor as zoom increases. Distortion on all images is negligible. Images tend to get more distorted towards the edge of the frame (with bent vertical and horizontal lines) at the top of the zoom range. He said conventional 8-megapixel sensors include only 4-megapixel green, 2-megapixel red and 2-megapixel blue pixels, which are interpolated to 8-megapixel R, G, B image. With pixel oversampling, all pixels become true R, G, and B pixels. What's more, based on Nyqvist theorem, you actually need oversampling for good performance. For example, audio needs to be sampled at 44kHz to get good 22kHz quality. Furthermore, he said the smartphone's superior low-light performance, combined with the ability to save in compact file sizes, makes it possible for anyone to capture professional images and easily share them via email, MMS or on social networks. From gulfnews