Nokia 9 PureView Now Available: A Flagship with a 5+1-Camera Array | Hacker News Reader

Nokia 9 PureView Now Available: A Flagship with a 5+1-Camera Array

anandtech.com

54 pointslaacz62 comments

This pureview-camera is designed by https://light.co who bagged $121m [0] in Series D funding lead by SoftBank a year back to develop what they call 'software-defined cameras' (SDN/IDN/NFV equivalent of the computer networking world, I guess). We might see more of these.

Here's a talk from co-founder Rajiv Laroia on their first camera, L16: https://spot.light.co/the-l16-under-the-hood/ ( https://youtu.be/vKmC9xWHhM4 )

The fancy camera aside, I'd have tough time recommending a Nokia device after they were caught sending user-data to servers in China: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19449824 but then again almost all major android phone manufacturers are Chinese...

[0] https://angel.co/light

Nokia is not a stranger to multi-aperture cameras. Their first acquisition in this space was from more than 10 years ago.

Logic is following - it is physically impossible to stuff decent optics inside the phone, and extensive software processing is unavoidable. Thus, if you have to drink the software processing koolaid, drink as much as you can.

Another notable player in the are is https://www.facetvision.de/ - Fraunhofer's third or fourth respin of their camera module business. They had silicon to show, but I believe nobody took the bait yet.

I almost bought a Nokia phone, but after I found out their Android One phones have a bunch of Chinese made services running on them I figured I might as well buy a Chinese phone with better specs for the money and went with Xiaomi.

The phone which send data to Chinese servers, were using firmware/software version only used in Chinese market. There were some faulty phones in wrong market where the firmware was using the "chinese version."

Yes, but as far as I know all Nokia phones have services from evenwell running.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/actk7z/android_one_p...

While I fully agree that the sending of user information by Nokia (or HMD Global to be specific) to Chinese servers was inacceptable breach of trust, I do think it was blown out of proportion https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt...

That's a translated version of an article where HMD explains it was part of the software included for Chinese phones as required by the Chinese cyber laws. Which to me seems very plausible, but well it was a big screwup on HMD's part. I am not really comfortable with any Chinese made phones, like my own One Plus, but yet there isn't really better options out there. I'm not sure does One Plus still come with the backdoor capable software pre-installed https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/7ugzgy/oneplus_con...

Shame really, that there hasn't been bigger blowback towards China for their security practises which seem to be a major cause of this.

am i the only one that is reminded by the "multi-blade razor wars", when gillette and wilkinson got into a "mine has more blades" competition? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-knive...

>> Gillette has historically called the shots in this razor war. It enjoys a huge worldwide sales advantage over Schick/Wilkinson Sword, which is now based in St Louis. With several lawsuits and countersuits constantly on the go, the companies can fairly be said truly to hate one another - especially since Gillette was unnerved in 2003 by Wilkinson Sword's brilliant and somewhat insolent introduction of the Quattro, a four-blade beast of a razor, which captured Gillette's jealously-guarded "most blades" title and has held on to it for the past three years.

With cameras more physical lense area and more sensor area should actually be beneficial.

If you think that is crazy look back to the Nokia 1020 that had a 41 MP camera and PureView back when most phones had like 8 MP. It took some awesome photos and several of my friends were very satisfied with the phone.

AAWP just did a PureView comparison, very interesting that the older Nokias actually beat the new Nokia 9 PureView

http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/23435_Imaging_...

Sounds like maybe I ought to pull the old 1020 out of my museum. One error in that article, though... it is possible to turn off the downsampling to 5MP.

I actually think 1 41MP is less crazy than 5 8MP cameras.

5 lenses, 5 chips and 5 angles, seems hard to use in unison, so you end up having 4 cameras you don't use.

seems hard to use in unison

Using the five lenses and five sensors in unison is kind of the whole point of this setup. The underlying technology is pretty clever and allows for some cool tricks not possible with a traditional camera. You can read more about the concept here https://light.co/technology

edit: that being said, I have no idea how well this turns out to work in practice

I had a Nokia 3650 for 4 years that had a 640x480 resolution, and it took amazing photos.

I also recently had a Nokia with a 12MP camera that was essentially garbage.

You can't really compare megapixels to megapixels, as the lens is more important.

You could have a 200MP camera, but if you're using a pinhole lens, you're just going to have 200 megapixels of crap.

Agreed, but the 41 MP had Carl Zeiss lens (I hear that is good) and the PureView tech. Please correct me if that is just a good name on slapped on a crap lens (I'm not a photography enthusiast )

Or nokia camera designer light's own camera.

https://light.co/camera

This deserves a link to a great article from The Onion. =) https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/nokia-firmware-blunder-sent-so...

Note I own nokia 7 plus (the phone that had this issue)

There was a fix released, for anyone with nokia 7 plus, just install latest firmware.

Also since this problem only affected 1 phone out of their line, I believe them it was a screw-up and not intentional.

It was bad screw up and PR hit, but it was not intentional.

I just hope it doesn't continue to happen, I would love to see Nokia not fail. Unfortunately bad PR like this will be uttered for years to come, some geeks are not very forgiving. We see it with Microsoft still, despite their many contributions to open source, and their openness compared to Oracle.

Otherwise I will have to stick to Motorola for my next phone, I love that Nokia and Motorola make more minimal phones. If Google would bring back Nexus as a way for manufacturers to release phones that are fully stock android, that would be great, or some sort of similar line of phones. Otherwise I'm leaning towards iPhone with all the stupid Android scandals, especially if one of the Moto phones is found to have a similar problem, enough is enough.

I've tried one and the quality of the camera(s) is indeed excellent. The phone can do some neat tricks, like changing the focus of a photo after it has been taken. However, it feels kind of slow: RAW photos need to be post-processed before you can tinker with them and this can take a while, specially if you have taken several pics at the same time.

Abysmal battery (in 2019) and chinese ad spyware in supposedly pure Android drop this phone to the bottom of competition. If it had rumored 4150mAh battery and clean system I would buy it immediately.

The UK site offers a free screen replacement... does that mean the screens need replacing straight out of factory?

https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/nokia-9-pureview/#recomme...

"6) The offer will be open to any customers who has purchased Nokia 9 PureView from the Nokia mobile online shop between 24.02.2019 and 30.04.2019 and are residents of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden or UK. The offer is valid until the stock lasts. Coverage period of the screen replacement is only valid for ninety (90) days after date of delivery of the phone. The customer must be aged 18+ and agree to the promotion rules to participate. Redeeming the Service may require a valid proof of purchase such as order confirmation from Nokia online store, or receipt or invoice from authorized Nokia reseller, showing the date of purchase of the eligible Nokia phone. Instructions on how to redeem your free screen replacement and full Terms & Conditions can be found here. Your personal data will be used according to HMD Global Privacy Policy."

Or is this in lieu of the free earbuds they used to offer before?

A PureView phone with no dedicated two-stage camera button? I thought these folks were former Nokia engineers!

> No 3.5 mm jack

Oh well

This is an important feature for me and I don't think the rest of the phone can make up for the lack of such an important feature.

I personally didn't find the lack of 3.5 mm jack to be as big of an issue as I thought it will be. I just attached the USB-C-to-3.5mm adapter that came in the box to the headphone cable and forgot about it.

Do you know if these converters are device specific or can I plug them into any USB-C port on any computer and have sound come out of my headphones.

On iPhones at least, the Lightning-to-jack dongle is actually a whole DAC. Also a DAC that works on Android wouldn't necessarily work on iPhones.

It varies from adapter to adapter. The one that came with my Pixel works on my 2018 MBP.

Some phones support audio accessory mode, which is a way to reserve some pins for analog audio signals. In this case, you only need a passive adapter. There's no reason why desktop or laptops computers couldn't support it, too, but if they do, it's rare. So such an adapter is unlikely to work with a computer, and may not work with all phones.

The alternative is an active device, with its own DAC and amplifier. This is more likely to work with all your devices; I'm pretty sure I could connect my desktop computer's external USB headphone amp to my android phone and it'd just work.

Details: https://www.soundguys.com/usb-audio-explained-18563/ https://www.androidcentral.com/usb-c-audio

I found it to be a really big issue. But i guess it is about expectations. I bought iPhone XS expecting it to be a none-issue, but it also doesn't come with a converter.

I use Arduino nano for that. I've programmed the port on Arduino to support any amount of new devices with any port.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia

Indeed.

I don't have Trypophobia but it does kinda make me feel a little uneasy. Just looks awful to me.

But the phone is perfectly regular and symmetrical...?

Wow, I got goose bumps looking at that picture. Weird.

Haha, I thought the same thing.

Very fascinating. Now I know why the Light-Camera [1] looks just plain ugly to me. The Nokia-Phone is a little better, but also non-pleasant at least.

[1] https://light.co/camera

Oh man, that is not OK.

That camera does look really ugly. Like it's got chicken pox. I wonder how they expect to sell well, with it looking like that.

Is it sending data to Chinese servers?

No. That was one particular model (the 7) that accidentally got Chinese-market software loaded onto all the phones, not just the ones required by law to have it. A software update corrected the issue since.

Your caution is warranted and laudable. In terms of traffic, this is not a stop sign, but a proceed cautiously sign.

2 × 12 MP RGB, f/1.8, 1/2.9", 1.25µm

3 × 12 MP BW, f/1.8, 1/2.9", 1.25µm

1 × TOF depth sensor

1 × dual-LED/dual-tone flash

Zeiss Optics

Who is this phone even for? If you're that into cameras wouldn't you go buy... a camera?

The best camera is the one you have with you.

Some people don't always want to carry around their DSLR. Having a decent back-up with great image quality in their phone that they always have with them is convenient. And not everybody is willing to buy a DSLR, but cares just enough about picture quality that they might get this. Apple and Samsung don't fill their advertising with how great their cameras are just for fun.

A compact camera like Sony RX100 or Ricoh GR II would give you better quality than phones camera yet smaller than a DSLR

Having GR III, but not very skillful with it, I would say that taking an image as vivid and clear as AI-backed smartphone (e.g., Pixel 2XL) is pretty hard. And it would likely require some post-processing.

But of course, the GR's image is much more detailed and sharper. But that is almost negligible on the small Instagram photos.

edit: typo

Yes and no. Phones these days have a lot of very smart built in software that makes it very easy to take good looking pictures in most situations by just pointing and clicking. Could a skilled photographer using an RX100 in manual mode and then spending 30 minutes in Lightroom produces better results? Absolutely. Would a picture taken with an RX100 in full auto mode using the default jpeg settings look better when viewed on a phone or computer screen, probably not.

this comment right there will be useful for years to come. /Saving

And yet it's still an extra device that you'd need to plan for using. I have this Sansa MP3 player with great quality audio that is 1/10th the size of your average digital camera. I still don't bring it with me anywhere anymore.

It's different from your normal DSLR, the point of those five cameras is to get control over the field of depth. You can shift the focus after you've taken the picture. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-47350379/hands-on-wit...

The very best camera is the one you have on hand when opportunity for taking a shot arises. Good luck lugging a DSLR 24/7.

Cheap phone + Ricoh GR

As others stated, I don't carry my DSLR with me at all times. It weighs almost two kilograms with the lenses and I need to have a bag for it or carry it around my neck for the whole day (did it a few times on a trip, ouch).

I bought the Nokia 9 because its faster to get good photos than a regular camera and easier to lug around than a DSLR.

For its price, I'm really happy with the specs and the camera. Only minus is the horrendous fingerprint scanner.

It's not people who care about cameras, it's for people who enjoy photography. Those are not completely related, since a camera junkie might enjoy collecting hardware for the thrill of it.

Does this one also report all your activity to China like the 7+ was exposed doing?[1]

That I even have to ask this question about a Nokia phone is just mind blowing and utterly telling about the appalling state of digital privacy in general.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19449824

Don't want to shill too much for nokia (or HTE), but it was fixed, and since it affected only one phone out of their line up I believe them, it wasn't intentional. Edit: typos

Something like that doesn’t happen by accident though. Someone had to write that code. For some configurations, markets or customers this was intentional behavior.

Maybe it wasn’t meant for everyone. This time. But if Nokia let it slip once, I see no reason not to be skeptical of future models.

They lost my trust. Now they’ll have to re-earn it.

Yes, that code was written for the model meant to be sold in China. I can completely understand how it might have accidentally been bundled onto a non-Chinese model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com