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Comment by chenster | Hacker News Reader

My first impression is, does more mpegapixel instantly make the Nokia Lumia 1020 a better phone? If you truly want to take good photos, use a real camera, like a DSLR. Admittedly, 41-megapixel is quite a wow factor, but based on the hardware specs it seems it's more of a camera than a phone. The other questions is, do people want to every photo to be 20MB+?

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>> If you truly want to take good photos, use a real camera, like a DSLR

As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you.

The reality, however, is, that your best camera is actually the one you left at home.

>> 41-megapixel is quite a wow factor

This camera is a little more than just the megapixel count. It appears that they use something similar to pixel binning to use those 41 MPs to make better 5MP images.

It's also worth noting that this and the 38 MP Nokia 808 phone have a 1/1.2" sensor, larger than all but one fixed lens compact camera, including cellphones. The only compact with a larger sensor is the Sony RX100/RX100 II. Not quite DSLR quality, but higher quality than you'll get out of most compacts.

The high MP counts allows you do downsample/pixel bin for higher quality images and also allows room to crop, providing a digital zoom which doesn't suck.

>> Not quite DSLR quality

If you are a big DxOMark fan, you'll find the RX100mk2 scores a 67, while the RX100 scores a 66, which is the same score as a Canon 7D's sensor.

And while you may argue that the 7D's sensor is old, Canon's been pumping variations of the 7D sensor into all of their recent APS cameras short of the freshly announced 70D.

I think Sony is rumored to use a RX100 lens or sensor in their upcoming Sony Honami (of 20 MP).

First, my statement had to do with the 1/1.2" sensor that Nokia is using. Close in size to the RX100 and Nikon 1, but we can't assume that means the same level of image quality- there's a pretty big gap between the RX100 and Nikon 1 IQ scores, for instance.

To your point, I agree. I've seen comparable (and sometimes higher) IQ from my RX100 than I do from various MFT and APS-C DSLR/MILC cams with their kit lenses including the Canon T3i and T4i, GX1, a few NEXes, and Nikon D3000-D3200. The RX100 fares well against those cameras at the wide end of the zoom range when it comes to low light performance and thin DOF as well. Of course, you could spend more and get better lenses for those cameras and beat the RX100 in low light.

I do hope that the new sensor in the 70D provides an actual improvement in ISO score if not IQ and isn't just the older sensor with OSPDAF added.

I didn't mean to sound like I was rebutting your original point about the 1/1.2" sensor -- Sorry about that.

I was just adding to the point about 1" sensors actually being as good as an SLR sensor, which they are.

Of course the RX100's optics limit some of its performance, but Sony's 1" sensor and the M43 sensor they sell to Olympus punch well above their weight, equalling or besting some existing APS sensors on the market today.

What a lot of people forget is that doubling sensor size gets you only one stop in high ISO performance. For raw quality in decent light, 1" seems to be a sweet spot.

The article does a really bad job of explaining what's going on here- the resulting photos won't be 41megapixels. It uses that huge amount as a means to "smooth out" the noise/oddities in the photo, and save it as a more reasonable 5MP or 8MP image.

Presumably the individual pixel size is smaller though? So where's the true advantage here vs having fewer larger pixels which would presumably have less noise anyway.

I read an article a while back when they were just testing this tech. It said the camera takes a picture at the full ~40MP res and then algorithmically chooses the best pixels and sizes down the image to a more reasonable 8MP. Apparently this has a huge benefit on low light shooting.

Pixels are also used for lossless zoom. You can crop a 5 MPix image from the full image with about similar quality as straight from iPhone's sensor.

There are a few ways this is advantageous. Modern camera sensors have a bayer filter in front of them - a RGB grid basically. This allows each pixel to see only one color of light.

The resulting image is "demosaiced" with an algorithm, where by each pixel determines the two colors it's missing by borrowing from nearby pixels.

This can cause some artifacts. By squeezing more pixels into the same space, effectively each resulting pixels in the ~8MP image has actual RGB data, not just data borrowed from neighbors.

Thanks -- I hadn't thought of that. I have read recently that there's a push away from Bayer filters, e.g.

http://www.43rumors.com/detailed-panasonic-colour-splitter-s...

But I imagine that's a long way off from appearing in smartphones...

The Nokia's pixels by my calcs are ~1.44 microns which is a little larger than an iPhone 5's pixels (~1.4 microns).

The Nokia sensor has around 5.5x the surface area of the iPhone 5 but only 5.125x the resolution.

So basically the Nokia's advantage is having both a high quantity of pixels and having larger pixels.

That's really interesting. Thanks! Very impressive to see that in a phone.

An incremental change to an existing product perhaps gets us excited for a few weeks then it dies down. The real question is would you want to use this phone because merely for its camera? A smart phone is more than just a nice camera and a touch screen. IT'S EVERYTHING. If the user interface and experience are still sluggish, even a 100Megapixel camera phone wouldn't do you any good.

I don't think this is supposed to replace DSLRs or Digital Rangefinders. But this will replace the point and shoots and possibly MILCs.

I truly love the quality from my DSLR but it's hulking compared to my MILC (a Sony NEX). For most things the NEX is good enough. If the quality can come close to that of MILCs, then I might just carry this kind of phone for most uses and take the DSLR only for staged shots and the like (non-P&S situations) and forget the MILCs and P&Ses.

You really need to read the article and research a bit more. It is not just about the megapixel number anymore. The resulting photos can be set to be as small as ones produced by a 5mpx camera. The wow factor is the ability decide what you want in the photo after taking it.

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