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Nokia Puts 41MPixel Camera In a (Symbian) Phone
judgecorp writes "We aren't sure what's the strangest thing about Nokia's new offering, the fact that it's got a 41 Megapixel camera or the fact that it runs Symbian. It has a very high resolution sensor and uses oversampling, apparently producing good results in low light. Users can either save a maximum of 38Mpixels, or else zoom and crop for normal resolution images. Observers expected a maximum of one more Symbian phone before Nokia shifts over to Windows Phone. This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe [that] Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone."
Unless it has a DSLR-type lens, the limitation is going to be optics, not resolution.
-taktoa
"This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone"
Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Shouldn't they expect a mazimum?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Is it really pixels or is it phonus balonus theoretical pixels?
I have and Olympus FE-47 cheepie "14 megapixel" which has worse actual resolution than my old Nikon Coolpix 800, which only is 1 megapixel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Your average phone has a ~4 mm (diameter) lens. This yields an Airy disc of some 1.15 minutes of arc.
Even at a wide field of view (say, 60 degrees), this yields a maximum lateral resolution of some 3200 pixels. Isn't thus any camera with more than ~10 MPixels diffraction limited by the tiny lens, and not sensor limited?
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I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized. I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use. I would much rather have a better sensor since I'm still reducing the image size anyway at 6MP.
I think the big issue is that the camera manufacturers pushed higher MP but never got around to telling Joe Public what exactly MP means to them. Sort of like Intel and AMD pushing faster clock speeds, but when max clock speed reached a plateau in the 3.6-4GHz range they didn't tell consumers a 2GHz quad core with a large cache will likely kill a 3.6GHz single core with a tiny cache so many consumers still go by clock speed alone.
I strongly recommend reading the white paper:
http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf
I'll look forward to getting 20 of those pictures in an email. Thanks mum, the 10 gig of pictures with nothing but the food you ordered whilst on holiday are great.Oh - I can see some bugs you missed in the salad :) / fires up Photoshop - Mwwhahahhaaa.
The captured image will occupy a small space in the upper left of the picture, the rest will be solid white but when you open the file it will still be 41 million pixels.
41 Megapixels - wow, that will take up an entire 2008 SD card per photo.
Does it actually have a good enough lense to use all 41 Megapixels- or is this a case of the megapixels being greater than it can really accurately capture?
I know megapixel is often not a good indicator of the actual photo quality.
Not really. A moderately high end DSLR with, say, an 18MP sensor saving in RAW (18m 12-bit samples)+JPEG is around 25MB an image. Based on Nokia's numbers, *if* the sensor can save in RAW, *and* its using 12-bit, you're talking in the order of maybe 35-40MB an image, and that's probably a stretch. In JPEG, its probably under 10MB/photo.
That would've filled a cheap card you would've seen in a digital camera ten years ago, but not five years ago. Most of the SmartMedia cards I've got in a box at home from a ten year old 2mp-ish camera are 128MB cards.
This suggests either a longer life for Symbian - or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone.
Or as most of us have figured out, Nokia has been a rudderless company and this is probably the work of the "let's turn Symbian into a smart phone" faction and this is just to recover a little bit of all the money they've wasted, just like the pathetically few N-series phones they released. They probably jumped on the wrong ship when they went all in on Windows Phone, but at least that one is going somewhere. Nokia never managed to agree on one thing and then actually do it well, so Apple and Google ate them for lunch. Epic management fail, if you ask me.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized. I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use. I would much rather have a better sensor since I'm still reducing the image size anyway at 6MP.
Even at 10-12MP you're fine for poster resolutions. This is the resolution current DSLRs operate at (even most full frame ones), simply because it's where you're going to get decent levels of sensitivity in the pixels and not too much noise.
More so, because the lenses, even on DSLRs can't actually resolve that resolution except in absolutely perfect conditions.
Nokia understands it. They have a whitepaper on the technology which explains the use of the chip. Mainly, it is used for digital zooming.
Link to whitepaper: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf
Some sample pics, apparently:
http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip
They look OK, and amazing for a phone.
It's not designed to take massive high resolution pictures. All the megapixels are there for the Zoom capabilites that most cell phone cameras lack. It's not like you can put an optical zoom on a phone, so this is the next best thing. Only problem is how well can they stabalize the picture if you zoom in 20x times.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Again, check out the whitepaper which explains how the pixels will be used:
http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf
The blog here: http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/1263008/nokia_808_pureview_photo_samples_released.html has bot a brief explanation of how the pixels are used and some sample images. Same images as in the zip file in the previous post.
You really didn't even pay attention to the summary, let alone the article did you? The core use here is for super-sampling with dedicated hardware that produces superior 5MP & 8MP images. So... they agree with you! They have created a better sensor. It just so happens that you can also use it in non-super-sampling mode if you really really must.
sigh, i see this thread devolving into flames by pixel peepers who will find the most minute issue to pick at while failing to just look at the damn pictures admit that they look quite nice. The kind of folks for whom photography has little to do with the actual content of the picture. I think the samples look pretty good considering they came from a cell phone with "fake" 41MP sensor and a lens that's "too small".
Nice job Nokia. Would have been nice to see this tech a few years sooner when you still were a player in the US market. I'd love to see them license this. I don't plan to buy a Nokia phone, so it would be cool to have a decent camera in the form factor of say a thumb drive that i could just keep on my key chain.
The core use here is for super-sampling with dedicated hardware that produces superior 5MP & 8MP images.
But you can also "super sample" by making fewer, larger pixels that will collect more light each. Canon stepped back to a 10MP sensor for low-light performance in their G and S9x series cameras (they've since gone back up to 12).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Keep making fun of Nokia ignorant yankees. One of the main reasons Nokia is non-existent in US is because it tried to stand up to the telcos and protect consumer's rights by not crippling the phones as per the request of your greedy-ass cellular carriers. I guess it won't be making that mistake anymore.
The 808 just goes to show that some companies still employ engineers instead of designers. I mean, Apple has to rip off that patented technology from somewhere. ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-pays-up-licenses-patents-from-nokia/50558 )
I'm not new here, so I know it's a lot to ask, but in addition to reading the fucking article, I encourage everyone to read the white paper too: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf
Also check out the sound quality of the 808 recording (listen with good headphones or speakers to really appreciate the difference) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EbLFtF50y9A
Nope, they'll use 90% JPEG compression.
I don't agree, if you average the input of 8 pixels, you reduce the error that you would get by sampling from one. Pretty basic statistics.
BECAUSE MEGAPICKELS!
Typical consumers don't buy a camera based on the quality of it's optics. People could give two shits about Carl Zeiss and probably only know the name because someone on TV oooh'd and awww'd about something with a Zeiss label.
Typical consumers don't understand the circle of confusion or why a small cell-phone or compact camera sensor is going to produce inferior images to a larger sensor.
Typical consumers don't understand depth of field, fstops, the zone system, tonal quality, dynamic range, or any of that other nonsense.
A typical consumer CAN compare two numbers and figure out which one is larger. Since this something everyone can do, that is where camera marketing has focused.
Canon, for instance, pushes sensors with huge megapickle numbers, but side by side their resolution is the same as the competing level Nikon or Sony. The only way you're going to get an actual resolution increase over the ASP-C sensor is going larger. All other factors being equal, a full frame sensor (35mm) produces a better image than an ASP-C. A medium format sensor (60mm) produces a better image than full frame (35mm), and so on.
So why is Nokia peddling on the megapickles instead of the oversampling or the digital zoom abilities, or the sensor size?
Because of understandable marketing.
The point is not to take 38 megapixel images. I don't know why everyone is focusing on the megapixel, that is not the story here.
The story here is the approach they take, 41 megapixel oversampled images processed algorithmically to produce superior 5 mega pixel images. The story may even be Symbian, definitely not the 41 mega pixel sensor.
Mod up parent and reduce the rest of the comments into nothingness.
Pictures are 5MP standard.
On the short end, combining pixels help to reduce lens abberations due to pixel size.
On the long end, placement of relevant pixels in the centre reduces lens abberations.
And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
Eight pixels instead of one? I think there's a lot of holes in your CCD grid.
Obliged http://xkcd.com/1014/
now we will end up seeing way too much. TMI.
I've put a ferrari motor on my lawnmower. Now it can go superfast and I could do races with it, but I still use it mainly for what it was design for, mow the lawn...
However, the signal-to-noise-ratio is higher for each individual pixel. I'm not sure how the noise does scale exactly with pixel area, so I can't tell whether plain supersampling helps that much or much at all.
A while ago I read rather vage explanation that camera makers for these kinds of tiny cams do introduce certain errors in the camera optics on purpose so that they can tweak their way around the resolution barriers for sharp images. This trick naturally relies on a post-processing step. I wish I had more information on this kind of trick to judge it.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
Actually since this is a near diffraction limited lens working at f/2.4 the spot size is going to be about 0.56um * 2.4 ~ 1.344um on the focal plane. The cycle size is about double, or 2.688um.
Considering it uses a Bayer array, and the pixels are spaced at 1.4um, the green pixels will be spaced at 2um (minimum distance to next green pixel). To properly sample you need at least 2 pixels per cycle (said Mr. Nyquist), but since pixels are not exactly points (they have an area) astronomers working in diffraction limited imaging advise 3x sampling in practice.
What this means is you would need a pixel size of 2.688/3/sqrt(2) ~ 0.63um (or 0.9um if using a Foven-style sensor) to properly sample this lens. 1.4um vastly undersamples the lens, as can be seen near the central area in the available samples: they are razor sharp in the central area, and otherwise are limited by aberrations.
A practical article describing this, with example images, can be seen here:
http://samirkharusi.net/sampling_saturn.html
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
Not true. So long as you are away from the diffraction limit and your glass is good enough and you have enough light, the resolution is determined by the pixel count.
Those conditions are very hard to satisfy for very high pixel counts, and there usually are other limiting factors (noise/focusing errors/optical aberrations). But, in principle (and sometimes in practice) it's the pixel count that limits absolute resolution.
My 20Mp camera let's me crop and correct in post framing issues. I have created fantastic photos from casual experiential shots because if the larger image.
Also. at 20X30 a 20mp image looks a LOT better than a 10mp image does, IF printed on a printer that can do the resolution. the garbage printers at Costco can not.
Honestly, sell your old Canon Rebel and get a Rebel t2i and get a camera that sees in the dark and kicks the crud out of that paleolithic age camera... IF.....
If you have decent glass. Crap glass will not take a better photo on more megapixels. L series glass really shines with the big sensors.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not just statistics, though. The sum of the light collected by the 8 is lower than the sum of light collected by the one - the surface area is smaller due to the extra circuitry and other non-light-collecting chip features.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
True, the good thing about recording shooting more than you need is that you can crop though, I've been reading some such thoughts about the Nikon D800 (36MP, $3000 camera) and the JVC GY-HMQ10 (4K, $5000 video camera). Need an extra 2x zoom on that camera? Crop it to 9MB and you still have a very useful picture. Is what you're trying to film moving to erratic for you to stay on target? Zoom back out and crop to 1080p in post-production. Not a cheap solution but if you're can't get another take, it might be worth it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Meh, I saw a 6 MP image from an early DSLR blown up to ten story building size once. It looked fine.
"digital zooming" is just in camera cropping. If your sensor is exceeding the resolving power of your lens your digital zoom is just going to be blurry pixels. You can put a nice big number on the box though.
Silly sensor resolution is silly whether you use it for fake zooming or not.
First off, think about how people use their phone as a camera.
1. The keep their phone in their pocket.
2. They whip it out holding it in the air and take the picture.
3. They post it on facebook.
OK now lets talk about a 43mp will look after this process. Or for that matter even a 5mp super-processed perfect picture.
1. Keeping the phone in a pocket or purse.
The lens will invariably get covered in dust, fingerprints, and get scratched from cleaning with a t-shirt. This will take about 24 hours from the purchase of a phone to degrade the lens to a point where even a good 43mp imaging system will look like a carnival mirror.
2. They whip it out holding it in the air and take the picture.
Hand-holding a camera invariably add some jitter to the image. You will have better luck in daylight but indoors or at night, its enough to degrade the image from slightly soft to psychedelic . Oh dont you wish the phone had a flash? Most dont because it drains the battery and adds bulk.
3. They post it on facebook.
After you wait 10 minutes for your image to be uploaded over the wireless connection.. Guess what happens to your 43mp image or your super-sampled 5mp image? it gets resized to a puny half megapixel image.
Enjoy!
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
This will help you with image quality, but will do NOTHING to solve the central problem that Nokia wanted to solve.
RTFA, fercrissakes.
Because you're not going to put a telephoto lens on a smart phone.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, sell your old Canon Rebel and get a Rebel t2i and get a camera that sees in the dark and kicks the crud out of that paleolithic age camera... IF.....
The Rebel t2i is very nice, have one myself. Just don't be cheap on the lens and filters. And if you install "Magic Lantern"(http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wiki), you really have a nice camera!
And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
Don't they use a dedicated chip to process the images? A driver for it can probably be integrated, given some time; Elop seemed to indicate it may eventually happen. Mind you, the technology has been 5 years in development as it is.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I dunno. I"m excited to see the new Canon 5D Mark III come out!!
I've been wanting to get a nice, high end DSLR for some time now, and have been saving and hearing this new version would be out soon.
This looks to be about 22MP....smaller than the recent Nikon D800 offering, which I believe was 36MP.
I'm going with the Canon...seems to have the right size sensor, MPs....quality for shooting HD Video (and yes, I plan to use off camera sound recording, etc).
But there is apparently a good reason to have greater than 10-12MP. From what I hear, people use it a lot to help let them be more free with shooting the shots, and then cropping as needed in post?
I'm looking, however, to also save and get some decent glass.
I'm hoping the new 5D will come with something similar to the last one, with a L zoom lens that was decent to start with...but I will save and get a couple of good primes too.
I'm trying to study and figure out what I want to get for primes...as that they can get pretty $$$$$, and I want to spend my money wisely.
But that many MP in a phone? I would have to agree on that...why would you need that many on a freakin' cell phone?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
More megapixels + multitouch interface = win
Reason: It makes digital zoom less of a gimmick
Imagine this: You take a shot, then do the pinch gesture to zoom in on a certain spot. You also use a single finger to get exactly what you want from the shot to appear on screen. You keep on pinching/dragging until you have the exact final image you want. You've ultimately zoomed 3x and focused on a bird flying by (or something else) and you click "save". You have an effortlessly taken image of a bird flying by, not needing any editing software to get it exactly how you want, with the same quality as current phone digital cameras -- but essentially an impossible shot since you'd have to be flying with other phones to take it.
With the right software and interface, even a gigapixel camera would be worth my $$.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
You can't really compare a cell phone image sensor with a reasonable camera image sensor. There is generally a very significant difference in size between the two. Larger sensor collects more light. More light on the sensor means less sensitivity gain, means less noise in the picture it produces (particularly in low-light). Even if you compare two identically sized CCDs, one with eight times the pixels, you end up with eight pixels with significantly more noise than your single pixel simply because less than 1/8th the light is hitting each of those sensors (hence an even *higher* gain on each of those).
I'm not saying it's going to be a bad cell phone camera, I'm simply saying that increasing the number of pixels over the same surface area of the sensor doesn't in and of itself give you a better image. I think the main benefits they will get with the high resolution CCD here are the ability to do significant digital zooms by cropping and using pixel averaging to keep a reasonable quality for images that aren't zoomed in.
+1 Disagree
Speaking of filters....
I'm looking to soon get either the Canon 5D Mk II or the new Mk III....depending on the specs/price for new and how much the price drops for the current model.
Anyway, wanting to shoot video outdoors..and be able to open the aperture up full. I've been reading about neutral density (ND) filters. I've been reading that there are some good single units that are variable, and was thinking that might be where my money is best spent (as that I'll be a bit poorer after the camera body investment).
Do you or anyone else have insights on this and recommendations?
Also, for a new FF camera, hoping it comes with a decent zoom lens as a kit...but I want to get a couple nice, fast primes. Suggestions for those?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
but but how we will get those CSI like scenes where people zoom in a lot with perfect resolution in order to obtain the evidence, don't you want to catch the criminals?
You really didn't even pay attention to the summary, let alone the article did you? The core use here is for super-sampling with dedicated hardware that produces superior 5MP & 8MP images. So... they agree with you! They have created a better sensor. It just so happens that you can also use it in non-super-sampling mode if you really really must.
Uh, what?
They're not super sampling, they're down sampling. The physical sensor is always 41 MP. They can only super sample temporally, which is retarded.
They've got a 41 MP sensor. You can run at 41 MP and get the noisiest image in the world. Or you can run at a few MP and get a that 41 MP sensor's image shrunk down, or (even dumber) you can get a crop of that 41 MP sensor (YAY DIGITAL ZOOM!). Super sampling is the process of taking more samples than required for the output. The sensor is always 41 MP and always takes that many samples. Digital zoom throws most of them away. Taking a lower resolution picture just resizes the image. To super sample with a fixed sensor array like in a camera, you'd need to take multiple pictures, either building one larger image and then sizing it down (hope you have a steady hand) or taking multiple pictures over time and laying those on top of each other (hope your subject doesn't move).
The "dedicated hardware" is just some piece of shit DSP that tries to voodoo away the noise. It's gaussian blur + unsharp mask on a chip.
I don't agree, if you average the input of 8 pixels, you reduce the error that you would get by sampling from one. Pretty basic statistics.
Nope.
The "error" from sampling a pixel comes from the sensor being shitty, not your ability to read it.
The shittiness of a sensor is directly tied to its physical size / MP.
Given sensors of 5 MP and 40 MP, of the same dimension, the 40 MP sensor will be far more susceptible to noise. Each pixel receives less than 1/8th the amount of light, and you get a shittier image as a result. (It's less than because of the overhead. Draw a square, then divide it into 9 squares. The lines are the overhead you don't get to sense light from.)
Yes, but you will also lose the possibility to zoom by selecting a specific area of the sensor for the final 5MP image. Of course you will get less oversampling, and finally only the actual pixels, but at least there's no digital zoom involved.
It is what it is.
I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use.
Then you are going to love this phone's camera, since the default setting is 5MP, and unless you set explicitly the "tricks" mode, 8MP is the largest setting in normal mode.
I think the big issue is that the camera manufacturers pushed higher MP but never got around to telling Joe Public what exactly MP means to them.
I think all agree on this. Even Nokia. In the paper they published they say:
People will inevitably home in on the number of pixels the Nokia 808 PureView packs, but they’re missing the point. [...]
It all stems from the very early days of digital cameras, when image quality was affected by the limited number of pixels available. As the pixel numbers increased, image quality dramatically improved. However, once the resolution reached around 5Mpix-6Mpix, the real-world benefits became debatable.
But by then, the market had made a direct correlation between number of pixels and quality of image. The more pixels the better, was the received wisdom. And this thinking has stuck. Though today manufacturers would happily reduce the number of pixels in their cameras, and instead concentrate on their lenses and sensors, they’re not so sure the market would accept this.
Is nice that the company selling the device is stating this from day 1.
[ahem]
Now to be fair, they do go on to add:
Translating the horrid marketing speak - they are saying that you can also use it for digital zoom. But I'll believe that when they show me an image that isn't a brightly lit sky scene, lacking any shadows - every point-and-shoot I've owned since the 1.3 megapixel days has been limited by it's lens in all but the best conditions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
yes, exactly! i prefer that my images are sharper, i use a 6 MP camera, a point-and-shoot Sony, and the images are all blurry, and i reduce them to 1280x1024 pixels anyway... i prefer it takes *sharp* 1280x1024 pictures rather than blurry, or dark 987432432x9890432 pictures.
my sig pwns your sig
Taking a lower resolution picture just resizes the image. To super sample with a fixed sensor array like in a camera, you'd need to take multiple pictures, either building one larger image and then sizing it down (hope you have a steady hand) or taking multiple pictures over time and laying those on top of each other (hope your subject doesn't move).
The "dedicated hardware" is just some piece of shit DSP that tries to voodoo away the noise. It's gaussian blur + unsharp mask on a chip.
Mmm. I read the white paper.
You know, the default output size is 5MP. What do you think happens when you size a fixed size 38MP (depending on the aspect ratio) to 5MP? Why yes, I believe you will have several samples for a single pixel. And guess what the dsp does. It voodoos away the noise by shrinking the image down from those (extra) samples. (The separate chip is needed because the processing power limitations of mobile chipsets (at least at the design time. I think this is about to change)).
Zooming by throwing some of the samples away is not ideal, but it does allow zooming without need to upscale the image, which is nice. Especially if you are taking a video.
It is what it is.
Of course you will get less oversampling, and finally only the actual pixels, but at least there's no digital zoom involved.
Agreed, but have you ever seen a pocket shooter (let alone a cell phone camera) that isn't lens-limited? Maybe they can make this useful with full-daylight landscape shots with lots of midtones and highlights, but there is no way that you can take a picture of like a family reunion group shot and get usable portraits by digitally zooming. And for a typical 4x6 or computer monitor or MMS, there is plenty of oversampling already even with a 4 megapixel camera.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The nice thing is that fixed lenses (generally) produce better images than zoom lenses. I'm waiting for articles with some comparison images, should be interesting.
It is what it is.
I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized.
Well, unless you decide to crop. Then you can see your MP drop fairly quickly if you only want to print part of a photo.
Daniel Rutter of Dan's Data has interesting things to say about this sensor on his blog. Short version: it might just not be as stupid as I thought.
Since it has been possible. They are no SLRs but for something which you always carry about with you they can produce very good results. Their N series are generally superb camera phones. Very good lenses, very good sensors and very good software. The N8 which has to be a year old now has for example a 12mp sensor, carl zeiss lenses.
MS define the hardware for WP and Nokia moving faster than Microsoft, it explains why Symbian is still around.
Deleted
The high megapixel is used as an artificial "zoom". I'd prefer optical zoom in the first place but if you don't even have a real camera and just a dumb-smart-phone then it's a second best option. (at least until they find out that a pearl sized lens is not the best optics no matter what the brand name on the box)
> I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use.
I still have a 6MP DSLR, and it blows away any compact camera, 16MP or 41, unless you have a very specific use case.
The whole megapixel craze has mostly just lead to smaller pixels and more noise, degrading image quality. It is time to reverse the trend, because some of the 14 and 16MP cameras are truly horrible and even identified in reviews as a whole step backwards compared to the previous generation (10/12MP, which was already subtly worse than 6/8MP). See http://mpixel.org/en/
> What’s more, based on Nyqvist theorem, you actually need oversampling for good performance. For example, audio needs to be sampled at 44 kHz to get good 22 kHz quality.
Send those guys back to the signal processing course at uni. They obviously didn't understand it.
Have you read the whitepaper?
remember that the Windows Phone 7 OS can't support multiple processors so they can't use any of the new SoCs Android phones are using. Notice on the Android phones how it's mentioned how many cores the hardware has? Nokia can't do this with their Windows Phone phones so what else can they market/advertise about? Screen size and the camera is about it. Notice how the Lumina phones are pretty much the same hardware with differing screen sizes?
The way I figure it, they're putting this ridiculous setup out to pave the way for mega pixel race in Windows Phone phones. They'll not really sell many of the Symbian models but it's a marketing technique to pave the way for a mega pixel race with Microsoft based phones. Again, because they really can't use newer multi-core SoC's.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If somebody would release a 41-megapixel *monitor*, I'd be all over it.
It's not a part of megapixel race. What they're doing is supersampling to bypass several lens-related problems in camera phones. It's a brilliant solution on many levels.
Thing is, this is a PHONE. Not a DEDICATED CAMERA. It has issues with size of camera module and severe issues with lens that cameras can easily bypass.
They probably also use a dedicated chip, but thing is, in terms of calculating efficiency and OS overhead, symbian runs circles around all other mobile operating systems.
That's the main reason why it can still get away with low power ARM11 on low clocks, and still run fine (at least anna and belle do).
Yes. It's not really a "whitepaper" at least not as we used to know them. It's a long form marketing piece with some rough technical details in it. Are you referring to something in particular?
That must've been one hell of a big printer.
Right, the lens has to be smaller than a point-and-shoot, which is why this scheme is nuts. They are super-sampling a fuzzy picture.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah. Dont get a 5D. If you must have a "pro" camera get a 7D and spend the cash on L series glass.
Honestly, put the cash in the glass. the 5D does not take any better photos than the rebel line. the Glass on the other hand makes all the difference.
My 50mm prime 1.2 L lens is magical. utterly magical.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You do realise that "fuzzy picture" will be much cleaner then original because of super sampling with proper algorithms? Or do you not understand how super sampling works and why it's used?
No, I don't understand how they overcome the small lens with smaller pixels and math. I'd love a link to that!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What "smaller pixels"? Read the OP before claiming falsehoods to back up your statements. This camera has a sensor surface bigger then most if not all pocket cameras (as in dedicated camera devices), and completely unprecedented in camera phones.
You probably already have decided you want that camera, but if I were you, I would invest in glass first (keeping your current body or getting a cheap one) & only later upgrade the camera. Decent to good lenses might last you many decades, the body will be obsolete in 5 years.
A entry level DSLR is as almost as good as the top-tier ones, anyways, barring build quality.
What are you talking about? Where in the "OP" (original post, right?) does it say the sensor is so huge? It doesn't even mention the sensor size in TFA. Even if the sensor were the size of a football field, it wouldn't get more light through the lens.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Neat stuff this 808, really! Just that I bought Nokia flagship n97 three years ago -- which as you might be aware receive negative reviews for good reason. This 808 is eerily similar looking. That alone makes me think twice about it...
So I found a pdf describing this system, and it says the sensor is 1/1.2", which is quite large for a phone. Nevertheless, I'm quite skeptical that the sensor is the limiting factor - though it looks like they bulked up the lens quite a bit, too. The lens is f/2.4, which is the same as an iPhone, but has to be much larger to accommodate the larger sensor.
So I don't doubt that this camera will take better pictures than other phones - I just doubt that the resolution is useful. I bet a camera with a sensor of the same size but with 1/2 the number of pixels would take equivalent pictures in all but the most perfect of conditions, and would actually do better in low light. A Rebel with an APS-C sized sensor only has 18 megapixels. That a much larger sensor (almost 4x larger) with a much better optical path, and Canon sees fit to limit it to 18 megapixels.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Rubbish.
There is one huge difference, the sensor size. A bigger sensor, particularly if the pixel count is similar, is more light sensitive, and it also (typically) can reproduce a bigger color gamut. The Nikon D800 (and big brothers) and the new Canons can (with the right photographer) produce rather spectacular images that are very difficult do to with a smaller sensor.
Also, not forgetting the light sensitivity of these sensors. Shooting at above 6400 ISO is not just an option any more, it produces images of a quality that can not be matched (or even come close to) with the smaller sensors.
Not strange you were modded down, you can't even read. When did Ballmer peddle Symbian? Moron.
Do the math.
The thing is, I've been talking with people here in New Orleans, and with all the tax breaks here, it is like Hollywood south....if I can get a body and even 1-2 decent lenses, I have people that can get me workingw with them immediately mostly for video work, and I can share their lenses with them....but lots of stuff to do here for $$ with multi-cameras....
That's one of the main reasons I'm on the plan I am.
If I can make some $$ to pay towards the camera (which I'll likely get on amazon for 1yr interest free), I can then start picking up good glass too.
I want to shoot good still to...so, this would be a good investment for me.
But right off to bat, I have opportunities for shooting HD video for production down here....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There is a ton of work here in New Orleans, for shooting with 5D mk2..and soon with mk3. I already have offers to come on board with crews here for multi-camera shoots...and I can borrow some of their glass on these.
I figure I get this camera from like amazon, 1yr interest free....and I should be able to get money from it to help pay it off fairly quickly....and also be buying my own glass.
I want to shoot stills and all too...but the 5D line offers opportunities to earn some $$, that I already will have lined up when I can get it....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd read people saying it had some kind of 'back focus' problem...is this something you're familiar with or have run into yourself?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I did - it's rubbish. A six megapixel camera has about 2000 lines of resolution (3000 x 2000). A ten story building is about 20 meters high. Your pixels would be in the neighborhood of a cm square (quick calc in head). You need to be rather far away to not see the pixelation. Obviously, any picture can be blown up to any size and look fine providing the viewer is far enough away.
Yes, that's the point. You don't look at a ten story high poster from three feet away. You also don't look at an 11x14 in your lap. Six megapixels seems to provide sufficient resolution that the angular size of a pixel is acceptably small for any reasonable viewing configuration.
People who say you need X megapixels for a Y x Z enlargement are silly. If I'm going to look at a 4x6 from an inch away with a magnifying glass I need lots of resolution too, but nobody would do that. Just like nobody would try to look at a ten story poster from three feet.
I DID see a 6 megapixel image used for a commercial, building-sized poster. It DID look fine. No, I wasn't three feet away. That would have been silly.