My first reaction upon listening to Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 Pureview was it had become an absurdity, an ideal example of the extremely worst of electronic devices, along with a total miss. However the more I just read, the greater I understood this phone is not some freak of nature having a ridiculously large number mounted on it. It is simply the marginally awkward steps of the serious move by Nokia to distinguish itself. If you have only skimmed this news, there’s something you need to most likely learn about this strange animal of the camera.
First, the 41 megapixel figure is actually misrepresentative, not saying false. It does not take 41-megapixel photos by any means, shape, or form. Even just in the special high-res creative mode, it “only” produces 38 megapixels. Mostly it will likely be taking normal-size shots, between 3 and eight megapixels. So what the heck performs this 41 megapixel figure even mean?
This means Nokia has been smart concerning the way cameras only at that size really work. I authored some time back about how exactly HD doesn’t imply hd, and cameraphones were a great illustration of this. Their small sensors and bad lenses resulted in when they may produce images of a particular size, the standard was greatly missing. It was simply because they was adamant on wringing every possible pixel from a remarkably small sensor. The 808’s sensor (supposedly made by Toshiba) isn’t small. At 1/1.2?, it’s 4 or 5 occasions how big most cameraphone sensors, such as the one out of the iPhone 4S. Bigger actually compared to sensors in many point-and-shoots. Now, whenever you help make your sensor bigger, you may either keep your same resolution but have bigger wells or photosites (which identify light making up pixels), which often improves sensitivity. Or keep your same photosite size and merely put much more of them around the sensor, which improves resolution. Within this situation Nokia has been doing the 2nd factor.
But they have tried it almost for an absurd amount, and they already know their lens, good because it is (and fairly fast – F/2.4 is solid, though there are many distortion at this time), can’t really resolve detail good enough that 41 megapixels could be necessary. Even on full-frame cameras that lots of pixels is questionable.
So rather of just bumping that one spec and planning on sell itself, they built an entire photo system round the idea. The 808 camera does not take 41-megapixel photos it collects 41 megapixels of information and uses everything data to produce a excellent photo of the much smaller sized size. Make a photo around 8000×5000 pixels that is not particularly sharp now shrink it lower to something considerably smaller sized – maybe around 3000×2500 pixels (~8MP), just like a quote. You’re doing so intelligently, sharpening and de-aliasing and doing noise removal.