Nokia launches 808 PureView with 41MP camera | Hacker News Reader

Nokia launches 808 PureView with 41MP camera

theverge.com

69 pointsdrodil36 comments

To people not in the know, the actual physical sensor size (in mm^2) is many many times larger than say the iPhone 4S and at least twice as large as many standalone compact cameras . The biggest sensor before this in any cameraphone has been in the N8 (to my knowledge) and this one has an even bigger sensor.

So its not just the megapixels, it is backed up an actually physically large sensor. Add in the great Xenon flash (which gives out much larger amount of light than say the tiny LED flash on the 4S) and you get a great cameraphone.

This is very important.

A typical phone has a 1/8" sensor. The iPhone 4S has a 1/3.2" sensor, which captures 6 times more light.

The N8 has a 1/1.9" sensor, so it captures almost 3 as much light as a 4S. 1/2" sensors are standard for point and shoot cameras, so differences in quality between point and shoots and the N8 would be mostly attributable to the optics of the respective cameras.

The 808 has a 1/1.2" sensor, so it captures 2.5 times as much light as the N8.

If you're keeping track, that's 44 times better than a typical camera phone.

This size is comparable to the worst compact DSLR's (the four-thirds system used by Olympus and Panasonic), although even cheap DSLR's are likely to have much better optics than a camera.

> This size is comparable to the worst compact DSLR's (the four-thirds system used by Olympus and Panasonic)

Are you sure? The article says the whole camera module is about 1cm in width and height. 4/3 sensors are 13x17mm.

Sensor sizes are very weird, 1/1.2" is not the diagonal: http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Camera_System/senso...

Looking the table there, I would guess this sensor is about 10x7mm, which is huge for a compact camera and 4 times (not many) the area the iPhone 4S, but a quarter of a 4/3.

However, it's incredible they could fit the lens for such a sensor in a phone, and in fact you see in the video that it's already quite thick in the camera side.

No, I'm not sure. Actually, I'm fairly sure I'm wrong, now that you've taught me something.

7728 x 5368 pixels on a 1/1.2" sensor

http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8....

I hope they will release it also with a non-dead phone OS

with so much noise per pixel that they are forced to bin 7 pixels together to produce a final 5MP image....

The linked article says "Nokia showed me poster-sized samples captured with the 808 PureView (printed entirely unprocessed) that basically had zero noise in them."

so, while Nikon and Canon are still not there at 41MP with full frame sensors, Nokia did it with a tiny phone sensor? if true, they should drop making phones immediately.

I still remember the hype around the (5MP?) camera on the N95 back then. Even the Nokia published samples were horrible, but the press made it sound like that was the best camera phone ever...

Nokia's camera phones have been pretty good in picture quality. My favorite was the N900 with its Carl Zeiss lens and the FCamera drivers from Stanford's Camera 2.0 project (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/).

Processing the pictures took forever, but the results were quite nice. Look at this one I shot for example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/5293597184/in/set-721576...

If Canon or Nikon wanted to produce a stupidly high (100MP+) megapixel full frame 35mm sensor they could. The pixel density on their compact cameras is about .3MP/square mm, a full frame 35mm sensor is 36x24mm (864 square mm), yielding a ~260MP sensor. They keep their high end bodies at a much lower resolution to increase the available dynamic range and enable shooting in much lower lighting conditions. It'll be interesting to see what they pulled off, but in low light situations (or high contrast) is where you'll see the issues of cranking up pixel density start to crop up.

It also allows more fps continuous shooting

Yes, but that is probably after the 7:1 sampling, since that is apparently what the phone outputs.

It is probably a very good camera, but together with Symbian I fail to see the point of it, the market for Symbian high-end camera phones must be minimal at best.

Unless possibly if it is a 'prototype' that they decided to sell to try and convince MS that they need to be able to do similar stuff but with Windows Phone.

It is actually a very interesting approach. The traditional way to fight noise is to have sensor elements as large as possible within the limits of sensor size and resolution.

Basically having larger sensor elements is like having a bunch of smaller elements that cover the same area and averaging them.

But if you can read these smaller sensor elements probably you can do better than just averaging in software, if you have good noise model and image model.

I am really curious to see what algorithms they use for demosaicing/downsampling, and what kind of lowpass filter is in front of the sensor.

yes, but binning pixels is inferior to averaging because the noise in adjacent pixels is correlated. (I had a nice paper about that, still looking for it)

If the noise model can take into account the neighbouring pixels correlations this is even better, because information about the noise in one pixel gives away information about noise in close by pixels.

The worst case is when the noise is uncorrelated. Think about the other extreme, when noise in all pixels has correlation 1, i.e. it's equal. Then it is extremely easy to remove.

(BTW, I would be very interested to the paper you are talking about, if you can find it :) )

but the problem is that you do not know what is signal and what is noise. If you have two pixels with correlated noise, you have in the extreme case s_1 + n and s_2 + n, so averaging that gives you (s_1 + s_2) / 2 + n. If the noise is uncorrelated, then it might be positive in one pixel and negative in the others, so it might cancel itself out. In the extreme case you would have s_1 + n_1 and s_2 + n_2 and (n_1 + n_2) / 2 < n. Thus you have reduced the noise.

Three full-res (about 34MP 16:9 and 38MP 4:3) JPEG compressed sample photos: http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-conte...

The quality is remarkable. The bokeh is quite good in macro shots.

They should indeed start making super smart cameras (cameras with Apps) that also happen to be able to make calls.

Pureview whitepaper: http://press.nokia.com/wp-content/uploads/mediaplugin/doc/no...

Confirms 1/1.2'' sensor size. Approximately 2.5 times larger sensor than the one in the Nokia N8.

"...And in good light, visual noise is virtually non-existent...." - well of course, but it's not about good light, it's about bad light.

Forget about comparing that sensor to other phones, that sensor size is significantly bigger than a lot of enthusiast P/S cameras like my X10 (2/3 or 1/1.5). Heck, it's almost as big as a Nikon CX sensor.

Even with only 5MP images, I would expect that the images would be stunning, especially considering that they're coming out of a phone. A phone!

Hot damn, nice work, Nokia.

There are some sample images here, though sadly not at full size:

http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-808-pure...

Nokia should make a compact camera with this technology - with a better flash, lens and so on. It's a dying market but with this size and a DSLR-like quality - could be a huge hit anyway. And no one would complain about OS or lack of apps.

There's already a system with that type of sensor - the Nikon 1, whose sensor is just a hair larger.

with symbian?!?!

With windows phone i might have been interested, but with a dead OS where I cant get my favorite apps, forget it.

From the Q&A in Nokia's press conference, it looks like they will be bringing this imaging technology to their future WP phones too.

Symbian has quite good coverage of popular apps. Of course it is still way behind Apple store/Android market but you might get lucky.

Last year, when I had a symbian device from work i was missing several must haves, most importantly dropbox and evernote.

The UI was pretty laggy too.

Situation has changed a bit: http://store.ovi.com/search?q=dropbox http://store.ovi.com/search?q=evernote

Symbian UI got better with Belle still worse than Android, MeeGo or iOS.

If the technology really is any good, they'll be offering it on several phones soon.

Actually it allows user to take either 5MP, 8MP or 38MP images so the forcing to 5MP is only optional though gives much less noise to the image. I am hoping to see this live and play around with it!

Those choices are bit odd imho, 5 and 8 are relatively close each other, and then there is huge gap to 30+ megapixels. Wouldn't it make more sense to have eg. 8, 16, 30+ megapixels?

I predict the MP race will end up the same as the GHz race, and allow people to finally understand that large a Megapixel value does not equate to better picture quality. Unless of course you're going to make a huge billboard print using an image from current gen cell phone lens.

That's very wishful thinking :) The GHz race ended due to physical constraints and cost, not due to people finally realizing anything. It will likely re-start once a new technology is developed (graphene?) that allows for even faster clock speeds.

Megapixel race has already mostly ended. Most extreme example is Canon G11 which had 4 megapixels less than its direct predecessor G10. Point'n'shoots have hovered in the 10MP range for some time now.

And the stock went down 5% in the first hour in OMXH. After extraordinarily bad business decisions you need even more extraordinarily good solutions to even get even.

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