This is Nokia's Lumia 1020, a 41-megapixel Windows Phone camera | Hacker News Reader

This is Nokia's Lumia 1020, a 41-megapixel Windows Phone camera

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7 pointsyread15 comments

That has to be a misprint. although it appears to be spread all over the place. If you took photos at full resolution all you would achieve is using up all your disk space and making it harder to sync with other devices etc.

Unless I have really missed something this must be a mistake.

Edit: As noted by jcarney it looks like the high MP sensor is sampled down to create smaller files with high quality over-sampled pixels. That is quite exciting.

Yes. It's the oversampling with the 1/1.2” size of the sensor that makes image quality in low light really good.

Other feature is the ability to have usable digital zoom in camera without immediately having low resolution shitty image quality.

megapixels are pretty meaningless.

A decent bottom end DSLR (Nikon D3100 for example) will run rings around it simply because of the sensor size and optics.

Which is why the phone generates a 8MP picture with the extra information from the 41M and reducing noise.

http://c699379.r79.cf3.rackcdn.com/Nokia%20808%20Pureview%20...

Perhaps read the whitepaper before knocking it down as meaningless?

http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/849564/data/2/-/Download1.pdf

If you're comparing a phone camera with a DSLR, that's already saying something.

Here's a review of the technology by a digital photography site.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/8083837371/review-nokia-808...

Right, that looks like the thing that I missed. Thanks for the link :)

I know the details and understand pixel oversampling etc. In the real world they produce acceptable photos for the type of device but it is nothing special and definitely over-marketed.

I used an 808 for a week when they came out. Wishy washy colours, constant over exposure and distortion due to the pissy little lens. Not what they were promoting.

Whilst I compare this to a DSLR, a cheaper compact can do a better job of being a camera.

Personally I drag a DSLR around everywhere with me but that's because I started doing that sort of stuff before we had mobile phones and have developed an appreciation of quality prints.

> Wishy washy colours, constant over exposure and distortion due to the pissy little lens.

With the exception of maybe the distortion I'd chalk that up to crappy dynamic nonlinear exposure heuristics trying to boost dynamic range. For an example, take a look at the "HDR mode" in this guy's datasheet: http://www.aptina.com/products/image_sensors/mt9v034c12stc/

To be honest I think exposure was the software as you could reliably underexpose it and get the result you wanted.

Colours, probably dynamic range as you state. Looking at the curves for a pure white photo suggests range of blue was a little tight which is what made it look like out of date Kodak ektachrome on a good day. That may be software again bit I'm suspicious as the sensor on my D3100 doesn't exhibit that problem. Perhaps its better quality control.

Blue curves being off says they probably did a poor job on the transmittance of their blue filter material. There is also a trend toward oversaturation in cheap consumer cameras. Makes the consumer say "oh, it's so colorful!"

With cheap sensors the name of the game is always "get it close, and find a way to hack it so most people won't know."

But you can't have a dslr in your pocket. This might be the best pocket able camera ever.

There is no reason to compare image quality to DSLR unless you can keep DSLR in your pocket. If you want to compare against Nikon, compare against compact cameras.

This Nokia will big 1/1.2” sensor and it really removes any reason to have compact camera.

From a "this is a traditional camera" standpoint, megapixel specs aren't completely meaningless, but they're certainly not the be-all, end-all.

However from a "what can I do with this thing as a sensor?" standpoint, more spatial resolution is in fact more power. Take a look at light field mapping [1] and the Lytro camera [2]. The technique uses an array of micro lenses placed over a traditional image sensor to capture many small low resolution images from many slightly different vantage points. Then a deconvolution algorithm is used as sort of a reverse ray tracing algorithm to actually map out the way light is bouncing around the scene. As a result you can generate many many different images of the scene in post processing, with whatever focus characteristics you want.

In this case the optics are relatively cheap compared to traditional camera optics, but the hardware to handle the deconvolution isn't.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_photography 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro

Edit: To your original point however, in theory oversampling can be used to make up for crappy optics using techniques similar to light field mapping. Some mobile image sensors have a microlens array similar to that used in light field photography (OmniVision comes to mind). However in practice this requires that your crappy optics be consistent in how they're crappy, which presents other challenges.

I'm with you, though. When someone builds a cell phone camera with 120dB of dynamic range I'll get excited.

I've got a 900 right now. I've been waiting for this phone.

Not that it isn't totally overkill for my needs...

Seems a bit overkill. Is this a phone with a camera or a camera with a phone?

Nokia N9 camera quality already killed any reason to buy compact cameras if you also carry smartphone (unless you need zoom with compact but nobody seems to need it). It had already image quality that matched all but the best compact cameras. Lumia 930 and iPhone5 both have better quality than N9.

I know some people who travel around the world who own that earlier 41 megapixel Nokia 1808 PureView monster because its handy when doing inspections and documenting stuff and gives really good pictures. They could have bought any compact, SLR or phone combo they wanted but it hit the spot.

Lumia 1020 will have better image and video quality than 1808 and with optical stabilization it will choice for many professions where you need camera all the time, like Jorunalists without acameraman. I'm not just sure that people in general care about image quality so much that it will be a hit. On the other hand YouTube with all those stupid videos will be incredible marketing channel.

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