Friday, March 02, 2012

Nokia camphone explained (Update)

That 41MP phone camera explained on video.

Update: Ars Technica examines the Nokia 808 phone. There are some interesting data there.

2 comments:

Ken said...

Basically they have "jumped the shark", by creating something that is pointless. You can make a nice A3 print from a 10mp camera, if it has everything else right.

They don't have an optical system that is good enough, and there is no way that anyone will hold it still enough. Check this out http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/6788332514/ then download the full size image and have a look at the sky. Yes, it looks mottled. By sharpening they've increased the variation in the sky due to noise.

Timo Lehtinen said...

Pointless? Even when it allows something that's so far been unachievable in a phone, i.e. zooming without dropping resolution.

Why would they sharpen? That would seem pointless to me. In fact, they were asked why they didn't do any low-pass filtering with so much resolution to play with? The answer was that they made the design decision to favor the natural sharpness even if it meant letting some noise through. After all, you can always filter it later on a 'puter, if you desire.

Anyway, I'm very impressed with these low light video samples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbSXHp1xXpk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nqOIiGU5xM