Nokia808 PureView wins the award for Best New Mobile Handset, Device or Tablet at Mobile World Congress 2012!
Nokia announces PureView 808 with a 41 MP sensor
Today at their MWC2012’s press event, Nokia brought the PureView teaser to fever pitch with the 41 megapixel camera of the Symbian Belle-running Nokia PureView 808.
The Nokia 808 PureView uses a 41 MP sensor, which captures image data from seven adjacent pixels and condenses it into one, resulting in stills at around 5 MP resolution with amazing detail and low noise levels. The optics are Carl Zeiss and there’s Xenon flash and a LED one acting as a video light.
Technically, the sensor is able to capture 3 MP, 5 MP, 8 MP, 38 MP at 4:3 aspect ratio and 2 MP, 5 MP [Default], 8 MP, 34 MP at 16:9.
Video recording goes as high as FullHD 1080p at 30 fps and there’s also 720p@30fps. Video is H264 encoded and supports stereo sound. The large image sensor allows 4x zoom in 1080p and 6x in 720p.
Nokia 808 PureView
The Nokia 808 PureView has a single-core 1.3 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and runs Symbian Belle. The display is a 16:9 4″ AMOLED unit of nHD (640 x 360) resolution covered with curved Gorilla Glass.
There’s NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, USB on the go and 16 GB of onboard storage.
The Nokia 808 PureView should be on the shelves around May 2012.
The amazing science behind the Nokia 808′s mammoth camera sensor explained
In terms of mobile imaging, the Nokia 808 is a revolutionary device. Not only is it capable of taking images of up to 38MP, but it can also make use of a technology called oversampling, which means that out of several pixels of information it captures, it outputs to memory a single resulting pixel, which hopefully, is picture perfect.
There are three direct advantages to this oversampling technology: amazing image quality, lossless zoom, and superior low light performance.
Maximum resolution matters
The Nokia 808 can capture 4:3 images at up to 38MP and 16:9 images at up to 34MP. The sensor size at 1/1.2″ is impressive, and is more than double the one found on the N8. And if you gotta know, that means an estimated pixel size of 1.26 microns, as opposed to the 1.75 micron sized pixels on the N8.
Yes, the 41MP sensor of the Nokia 808 is impressive, but as evident from the above, you won’t be able to take 41MP photos. Here you can see all the different image aspects and their respective resolution. The sensor has a total active surface of 7728 x 5368 pixels, which does amounts to 41MP, but depending on the aspect ratio you choose, it will use either 7728 x 4354 pixels for 16:9 images or 7152 x 5368 pixels for 4:3 images/videos.
Actually, the default shooting mode for the camera is 5Mp in 16:9 aspect ratio. But you also get other options as well, including a full-res mode.
Pixel oversampling is like miniaturization but prettier
But enough about maximum resolution, let’s get back to image quality. The Nokia Team have spent a lot of thinking on how to improve the image quality on size-constrained mobiles. With pixel sizes ever decreasing, the challenge for engineers is quite clearly to overcome the negative effects of this, which are high digital noise levels and the resulting poor low light performance. Enter pixel oversampling.
Oversampling is different from mere cropping as it doesn’t simply use part of the sensor to produce a lower resolution image. Instead, it still uses the full sensor, but downsizes the resulting image to say, 5MP on the Nokia 808. The benefit of this is that this process of downsizing removes digital noise, while preserving the same level of detail you might get by shooting with the best 5 megapixel camera.
But there’s more to having such a huge sensor.
And it goes all zoom-zoom
Since the Nokia 808 captures so many pixels and is able to produce lower res photos, it’s only natural that it tries to tackle one of the other most wanted features in cameraphones – the lossless zoom. Instead of focusing on the traditional ways of delivering image zooming such as digital interpolation or optical magnification, the Nokia team has embarked on incorporating the highest resolution sensor ever found on a mobile.
Everybody has tried regular digital zoom, it’s no good. Some have even attempted optical zooming, but it’s way too bulky, noisy and even slow and introduces geometrical distortion. The only viable solution was the 2x digital zoom that was offered by the N8 in video mode (via pixel binning) but even that had some sort of an interpolation. But to be able to offer any zoom levels in still images, you need to have a solid sensor with a huge amount of extra pixels compared to the nominal output resolution. And lots of processing power.
To cater for the immense processing requirements (over 1 billion pixels per second and 16x oversampling), the Nokia team has developed a special companion processor to the sensor that handles pixel scaling before sending the required number to the main image processor.
Once that’s out of the way, you get lossless zooming with the same effective viewing angle – in 35mm equivalents, it’s 28mm in 4:3 aspect ratio and 26mm in 16:9. And depending on the resolution, you get varied amounts of zoom levels. In 5MP stills, for instance, you get around a 3x zoom.
I’ll let the Nokia team deliver their explanation of this new zoom method, they simply nail it in rather simple words:
With the Nokia 808 PureView, zoom is handled completely differently — like nothing that has gone before. We’ve taken the radical decision not to use any upscaling whatsoever. There isn’t even a setting for it.
When you zoom with the Nokia 808 PureView, in effect you are just selecting the relevant area of the sensor. So with no zoom, the full area of the sensor corresponding to the aspect ratio is used. The limit of the zoom (regardless of the resolution setting for stills or video) is reached when the selected output
resolution becomes the same as the input resolution.
For example, with the default setting of 5Mpix (307 2 x 1728), once the area of the sensor reaches 3072 x 1728, you’ve hit the zoom limit. This means the zoom is always true to the image you want.
The level of pixel oversampling is highest when you’re not using the zoom. It gradually decreases until you hit maximum zoom, where there is no oversampling.
Here’s an example of the amazing level of detail the Nokia 808 allows with its high-res shots.
In video, at FullHD 1080p resolution you get a 4x lossless zoom, at 720p HD video you’ve got a 6x lossless zoom, and for nHD (640×360) video there’s the option for some serious12x zoom. And you can bet video quality will be great, since the 808 encodes the video in up to 25Mbps worth of bitrate.
The Nokia 808 camera has some other impressive specs too
Even without these amazing, never-before-seen-in-a-mobile features, the Nokia 808 has some serious imaging potential. You’ve got a Carl Zeiss certified lens, a relatively large F2.4 aperture, and a Neutral Density filter for those high-intensity lighting situations.
The added mechanical shutter minimizes the disadvantages of the implementation of a rolling shutter such as the vertical stripes that appear in the highlights of high-contrast images also known as smear, as well as the wavy “Jell-O” distortion that sometimes appears if you move the camera while shooting.
Also, the large sensor size and the longer focal range of 8.02mm in combination with the large aperture delivers more blurry background in closeup shots as opposed to most regular cameraphones, which is exciting on its own.
Wrapping it up
As Nokia puts it, the Nokia 808 presents a “quantum leap forward in cameraphone performance”. Indeed, it introduces concepts we’ve never thought possible on a mobile phone. It’s not about the piles of megapixels but rather what you can do with them, such as producing picture perfect low-res images or lossless zooming in both stills and videos (including after-the-fact zooming and cropping). It’s one helluva camera and we bet it will be able to challenge most point-and-shoots on their own turf. Too bad they’ve picked Nokia Belle as the OS of choice. But we remain positive, as today Nokia representatives promised on stage at the MWC 2012 that this technology will get implemented in future products as well.
Nokia officially announce Lumia 610 and world Lumia 900
After many leaks, it’s now official – Nokia announce the Lumia 610 at the Mobile World Congress as well as the global availability of the Lumia 900.
Nokia Lumia 610
Running Windows Phone 7.5, the Lumia 610 is powered by an 800MHz single-core Snapdragon S1 processor and 256MB of RAM and 8GB storage.
With a 3.7″ WVGA TFT LCD screen, the Lumia 610 stands at 119mm x 62mm x 12mm and weighs 131.5 grams.
The camera of the Lumia 610 is a 5MP unit with auto-focus and a LED flash. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS are on board, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack, microUSB port and a 1300mAh battery.
The Nokia Lumia 610 will come in white, cyan, magenta and black for the price of 189 €. Nokia expects the device to hit the market some time in Q2.
Nokia Lumia 900
The Lumia 900 will make its global debut this year. Elop said the high-end Windows Phone device will also hit Canada with Rogers in its LTE version and DCHSPA, which doubles the speed of regular HSPA+ for the rest of the world.
The global version of the Lumia 900 will come in its usual colors, white, cyan and black and will retail for 480€. Like the Lumia 610 it will too out in Q2.
In addition, Nokia is updating some of the applications on Windows Phone as well as introducing new ones. Nokia Drive is one of the updated apps.
The updated Nokia Drive includes not only updated maps and content, but also the addition of speed limits, which is handy. And to make it even harder to resist, Nokia have thrown in full offline capabilities.
The new one is Nokia Reading. It is a personalized news feed app, just like Google Reader on Android or Pulse. Nokia Reading provides local language content as well as books and news. Nokia will provide the app as a free download, too.
In addition, Windows Phone is coming finally to China. And because of the need to reach emerging markets, Nokia announced the minimum requirements for devices to run Windows Phone 7 is now just 256MB of RAM on devices with Qualcomm 7×278 family of chips.
Nokia announces Asha 302, 203 and 202
Mary McDowell came on stage and got busy right away announcing three new Nokia Asha phones – the Asha 202, Asha 203 and Asha 302. The Asha 302 is a QWERTY messenger, while the Asha 203 is identical to the Asha 202, but with an extra SIM slot.
Nokia Asha 302
The Nokia Asha 302 features extensive communication skills. It features Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp integration, but also – get this! – Microsoft Exchange email. That’s a first for a Nokia feature phone.
Nokia Asha 302
The 302 runs on a 1GHz processor and has 14.4Mbps HSDPA which, McDowell pointed out, is faster than a lot of low-end Androids.
The Nokia Asha 302 is shipping now for €95 ($130).
Nokia Asha 202 and 203
The lower-end Ashas feature 2.4″ touchscreens and come with the Nokia Browser. Both have 2MP cameras. There’s also Bluetooth, microSD card slot for cards up to 32GB and FM radio.
The Asha 203 has a second SIM slot and will remember personalized settings for up to five SIM cards, so several people can easily share a single phone.
Those two come with a huge pack of EA games, no less than 40. You can download those off the Nokia Market for free during the first 60 days. That’s equivalent to €75 of added value.
Nokia Asha 202 and 203
That’s more than the price of the phones themselves, they’ll go for about €60 ($80). Launch is set for the next few weeks.
The Sony Xperia U has arrived and it’s just as gorgeous as the Xperia S – it keeps the same design language with the illuminated bar at the bottom, but it’s smaller – it comes with a 3.5-inch FWVGA Reality display with Mobile Bravia technology for juiced up color vibrancy. It still features a powerful 1GHz dual-core processor, though.
Elie Chahine 