I've been following this Nokia phone camera with interest. Forgive me
if I am wrong, but one is already thoroughly diffraction-limited with
these tiny sensors when you get to 10MP or so, even at f/2.4. So I
cannot understand how more pixels help with the "digital zoom" ? (one
then simply experiences "optical" blur instead of "uprezzed and
smoothed" blur, no?) Also interesting is why the down-sampling from
42MP to 3 - 8MP should produce superiour image noise compared to
simply bigger, better megapixels? I know there is a theoretical
advantage to over-sampling and then down-rezzing, but the advantages
are marginal at best in my experience. This sounds like a very
expensive route to solving the problem - but most of all, is probably
a marketing stunt? If it does not produce good 42MP output (and how
could it, even a theoretically-perfect 8mm f/2.4 lens in front of a
42MP sensor that size would very diffraction-limited) - so they
shouldn't put that on the outside of the box.
Of course, at the "intended" resolution (5MP) the images do look
mighty fine:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/6934446543/sizes/o/in/photostream/
We live interesting times where a $450 phone camera produces images
that are at least half as good (on all accounts, resolution, DR, etc)
as a $10,000 Leica M9 (plus lens) - in good light, of course. That's a
twenty-fold price increase, and the Nokia makes phone calls and does
computing also :-)
Dawid
On 28 Feb 2012, at 9:27 AM, Marc Lawrence wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Chuck Norcutt
> <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/27/nokia-announces-the-808-pureview-and-its-41mp-camera-we-go-hands-on/
>
>
> For further information from dpreview, it "will output 3, 5MP or 8MP
> stills" as "it oversamples the image and then pixel-bins down to a
> smaller size (though there is a special 'creative' shooting mode if
> you want the full resolution - 38MP at 4:3 aspect ratio, 36MP at
> 16:9)". Similarly, it "can offer a roughly 2.8x 'zoom,' while
> maintaining 5MP output, despite having a fixed lens". The article is
> here:
>
> http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/02/27/Nokia-808-PureView-with-41MP-sensor
>
> So it is not really a mobile phone looking for the most MPs for
> bragging rights, but more using the big MP sensor to solve some mobile
> phone camera limitations.
>
> Cheers,
> Marc
> http://www.happygibbon.com
> --
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