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."

Comments

Optics

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless it has a DSLR-type lens, the limitation is going to be optics, not resolution.

-taktoa

Re:Optics

[Andy_R]

That's true, but this isn't a tiny lens. The spec sheet doesn't give the actual lens size, but it does say there's a 1.5 inch sensor in there, which is a clue to the real flaw with this product. It's not really a phone with a surprisingly good camera, it's actually just a consumer level compact camera that happens to also be able to make calls. The big idea of getting rid of the optical zoom and just downsampling in the box, gaining both hardware simplicity and the advantage of averaging out noise when using less than max quality is fundamentally sound, but it probably isn't ready for real-world deployment in an actual consumer level compact camera... hence the decision to slap a phone on he back and pretend it's not a consumer level compact camera. This probably explains the decision to put symbian on it, the CPU of the camera this really ought to be probably wasn't beefy enough to run anything modern at a decent speed.

Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek

[rufty_tufty]

"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.

Re:Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek

[suy]

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.

I can't find now the link (maybe it was on a video), but they say they have been developing this technology for four years.

And BTW, the summary is somewhat unfair. On the announcement they have posted (besides some impressive photo samples) a whitepaper were they clearly say that is not about quantity of megapixels, is about the quality you get when you average the results given by each one. I've also seen some of the videos were you get a very smooth digital zoom without loss of quality, and is quite remarkable.

Re:Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek

[agentgonzo]

Is there some modern variant of Godwin's law that applies whenever you mention Steve Jobs or Apple in an unrelated conversation?

Diffraction limited?

[ControlFreal]

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?

Re:Diffraction limited?

[MozeeToby]

Summary is terrible and misses out the parts of the camera that are actually exciting. First, they never intend for people to use the 41MP setting, instead, they intend you to use 5MP and let their fancy new pixel averaging do it's thing to dramatically reduce noise levels by averaging out 8 pixels into one. That will allow higher iso settings, better low light pictures, etc. The other interesting thing is the size of the sensor, 10x7mm, which is ludicrously large for a phone, about 4 times more surface area than the latest iPhone's sensor. Heck, it's larger than the vast majority of point and shoots. Now obviously, just like megapixels, I imagine that sensor size could be artificially inflated just like any other number, but the example pictures they have posted look pretty incredible for a camera phone.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[SJHillman]

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.

Get the facts

[Anonymous Coward]

I strongly recommend reading the white paper:

http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf

ARghhhh

[ciderbrew]

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.

Re:41 Megapixels

[SJHillman]

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.

Re:Question is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sensor is much larger than a traditional 5MP phone cam sensor:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/02/27/Nokia-808-PureView-with-41MP-sensor

You say that as if there was a plan...

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[FaxeTheCat]

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

sample pictures

[jcupitt65]

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.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[UngodAus]

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.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[MightyYar]

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).

Shut up ignorant yankees

[kalpaha]

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

Not for taking 38 Megapixel - for 5 megapixel

[mrops]

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.

Re:Screw Megapixels

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not too many pixels in fact.

[rnbc]

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