Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Lumia 1020 Video and Photo Shoot Preview
MojoKid writes "Nokia, perhaps more-so than any other smartphone manufacturer in the game right now, needed to find a way to make something special. The new Nokia Lumia 1020, though it sports essentially the same internals and display as Nokia's Lumia 920, most definitely is different, and perhaps even an attractive alternative, depending on your specific needs. 41 megapixels of resolution, floating image stabilization and a powerful camera app to back it up, will make the Lumia 1020 pretty 'special' to some people, some of whom might be considering a Windows Phone for the first time as a result. Initial impressions of the device and its camera performance, show Nokia's new flagship device does shoot impressive still images and video, thanks in part to the Lumia 1020's image sensor and stabilization features. Nokia's Pro Cam app is comprised of a slick dial interface that offers virtually all of the controls you'd find in a DSLR camera. From White Balance, to ISO, Focus, Exposure and Flash Control, it's all in there. When you snap a picture, the 1020's camera grabs two versions of the shot; a large full resolution (7700x4300, roughly) shot with a huge 11MB file size is captured and an additional 5MP image is derived from that and stored as well. The results, especially in decent lighting, can be impressive."
Wake me up when Nokia can come out with something on Windows Phone which wasn't already implemented on Symbian two years ago.
The only problem I have with this phone is that it runs Windows Phone OS. The OS actually isn't that bad and the app support is definitely improving, but I just can't stand the home screen. With its pastel colors and overly-animated interface, it looks like they got the inspiration by watching Technicolor cartoons and browsing web pages from 1996. Whenever I see it, I almost expect to see animated GIFS of flames and a dancing Jesus. Other than the home screen, the rest of the OS isn't as bad as I thought it would be.
Does it sync with Mac OSX Contacts and Calendar? Without handing over my data to Google (share Google calendar ...)?
...you mean I paid how much and I can't change out the lenses on this camera? Wait, there's a phone built-in?
So I guess when I'm told in line "Sorry, sir, you can't use your phone while in line," I can say "Oh, no, I'm not sir. I'm talking on my camera."
WOOSH!
How much further ahead would Nokia be if the 1020 had been an Android phone?
The pictures don't even look that good. Blurring, CA issues and poor DOF.
That's too many pixels for a sensor that size.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Nokia's Pro Cam app is comprised of a slick dial interface that offers virtually all of the controls you'd find in a DSLR camera
But can you change the lens? Is the sensor large enough that depth of field becomes meaningful?
The 1020's camera grabs two versions of the shot; a large full resolution (7700x4300, roughly) shot with a huge 11MB file size...
My camera produces 20 megabyte raw files, but its sensor is only 14 Megapixels.
If the quality is any bit respectable, it'll just mean more detailed selfies on imgur.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And yet we haven't seen a single 7700x4300 sample anywhere on the net ....yet...
Not to my knowledge. Most of those reviewers on the net, links to flickr images with a max res of 3000x etc....
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Probably not much. No one but Samsung is making any real money selling Android phones.
Hold on it could have been Samsung making real money!!(sic) Nokia was four times the size of Samsung, who make more than even Apple(who lets be honest don't make as much as they used to), but that does not mean other companies are raking it in. Samsung have done well by producing great phones...can Nokia not make great phones?
It would be useless due to its bloated Nokia skin (requiring a quad core CPU to run smoothly) plus all the god awful Nokia apps.
Running android on a single core phone. Smooth as silk. Maybe you mean iOS; These are apple customers complaining about lag https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4317962?start=30&tstart=0 . The bottom line is quad-core means you can run more powerful programs in android.
So the OS doesn't allow you to take pictures, make phone calls and other various "phone" features?
Because loading a 40MP image can bring computers to their knees. Even at 3 bytes per pixel (which most implementations use 4, iOS does anyway) for image data, you're looking at 120MB of RAM just to uncompress the image.
Why not have the dedicated hardware built in to the camera processor scale it down so the ARM cores don't spend a few minutes trying to do it in software?
Yes, Nokia is Nokia. But Microsoft is Microsoft to, and nobody there wants a Windows Phone in their pockets.
I have only Nokia phones since 1999. I love this company, even with the Symbian debacle.
My N97 is dying. This Nok 1020 has great hardware, but I don't want it because of Windows. I prefer to focus on the HTC One, which is 9000 times less fixable than all the apple stuff that I love to hate.
If all these Lumia8xx/9xx/10xx were running Android...
I just did a test with Firefox on an 3.4GHz i7-2600. It took Firefox 14 seconds of CPU time (on a single core) to render a 40MP image.
Firefox can't show the image zoomed out, only at 1x zoom scale.
Conclusion: Rendering 40MP images isn't a day in the park.
If it wasn't windows then I would put this phone on my candidates list. I don't understand why they got into bed with Microsoft. I program apps for the iPhone and then port them to Android but would love to have a better Android as my primary phone. I don't want to wear the hair shirt of BlackBerry or Windows. It is sort of like the days when a few of my friends were all wound up about BeOS and before that OS/2. They could come up with all kinds of reasons that BeOS or OS/2 were awesome OSs but sticking to the mainstream OSs is just so much easier and when developing, profitable.
One thing though. I watched the video of the two dogs and while crisp it was odd looking. The colours were sometimes wonky and the dogs went weird when they moved fast. As an example the driveway turns quite blue for a moment while panning.
This raises the question of how it compares in price to other 41MP cameras that don't have a phone included with them. Maybe Nokia can re-invent themselves as a camera company.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have the Nikon D800 that takes 36.3 MP pictures and using Gwenview in Linux of Irfanview in Windows I can very happily and without noticeable delay scroll through a large number of these photo's, hell even the Windows picture viewer doesn't choke on it!
Now I did try to watch these pictures on my Nexus-4 and Nexus-7 and that's not exactly a pleasure, there I'd be glad with the 5 MP copies.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
11MB and 5 MP, not 5MB.
Their reduction algorithm is matched to their hardware.
The ignorance on /. is astounding.
Anybody who really cares about good photos and video is going to use a dedicated camera with interchangeable lenses, a larger sensor, reduced rolling shutter and RAW. For everyone else, the current phone cameras are "good enough."
with the bloat of firefox it probably has to spend the first 13.9 seconds freeing enough memory to load the image.
Imagine if this was running Maemo/Meego instead of windows phone.
How good your hardware is doesn't matter if its locked to shitty software.
I don't get what people liked about Symbian. It was slow, crashed, and the anyone who saw its horrific sdk praised microsoft for creating windows ce.
Windows picture viewer and other such pieces of software create thumbnails. Some images have a thumbnail image embedded in the meta data.
Please tell me again why creating both a 40MP image and a 5MP image is a bad thing.
That part of it was fine, as soon as the image started loading, memory usage shot up 200MB.
The hate here on /. for anything Windows is really shocking, there are so many sentences that just have hate oozing out of them, that just doesn't feel right. I've had an Android phone before and I currently have a windows phone (Lumia 800 with WP7.8). To be honest I love it. It's the smoothest phone I've ever had, it does everything I need it to, I have free offline navigation, I have all the apps I need, it lasts through the day, it never ever froze or crashed on me, it's very tough (it can take a hit/fall) and I just love the absolute blackness of the black, which makes reading a book on it at night great.
I'm not saying there's no better phone in the world, there are probably loads of good Android devices, and my GF has an iPhone 4S which I honestly also think is a good phone. Just tone down the hate a bit.
DPreview Connect Lumia 1020 preview (page-2) has even comparsions, see it.
The next step in video: cameras with internal framerate of 300fps that capture and save 100 of them with the precise timing of 50fps and 60fps video, combined with editing software that guarantees that as long as you stick to "splice points" falling every 100ms (the 1 frame in 5 for 50fps, and the 1 frame in 6 for 60fps, that both occur at the exact same moment in time before the next 9 frames diverge), you can shoot one source copy, then use it to generate native 50fps and 60fps output copies. Or, possibly, a version with outright asynchronous framerates that basically captures 60fps video with precise timing, adds a 7th frame 50#3 exactly halfway between frames 60#3 and 60#4, then quickly grabs a reduced-detail monochrome frame a few milliseconds before 60#2 and after 60#4, so that in post-production you could do motion-vector temporal rate correction on frames 50#2 and 50#4 that used the "quicksnap" frames to determine the exact grayscale detail & calculate the motion vectors, then derived the color by applying those motion vectors to the adjacent 60fps frames.
In linear order, with some semblance of relative timing:
50/60.1 --- 60.2 -- 50.2 - 60.3 - 50.3 - 60.4 -- 50.5 --- 60.6
Then, for the next stage, keep the imaging sensor with raw 300fps capability, and grab additional frames in between the 50fps and 60fps key frames with alternating longer and shorter exposures to obtain additional dynamic range that could be retroactively applied to the adjacent 50/60fps key frames in post-production (practically rendering lighting problems for shows meant for TV irrelevant, and giving news networks an extra bit of headroom since they CAN'T go back to re-shoot some live event.
For consumer gear, they could do something similar to skip the 50+60fps dual-framerate capability, and instead capture video at double the intended framerate, where every other frame is alternatingly over- or under-exposed, and enable the extra frames to either extend the dynamic range of the "good" frames, or do motion-vector transformations on the over/under-exposed frames to replace "key" frames that are themselves too dark or light to show directly.
Or, some variant on cameras for news crews where you have one lens and 3 or more CCDs, but instead of using the different CCDs to capture red, green, and blue, you'd expose and sample one CCD with 50fps timing, one CCD with 60fps timing, and a third CCD that's lower-res & monochrome, with extended infrared sensitivity and selectable IR-cut filter. In bright light, the IR cut filter slides in, and the monochrome channel gets under-exposed. In dark light, the IR cut filter slides out, and the monochrome channel gets over-exposed. In really dark lighting, it gets over-exposed at half the framerate with tweaked 25fps timing. The idea is that given enough time in post-production, almost anything could be salvaged from bad lighting.
Add fresnel lenses to high pixel density sensors so you can go in and re-render virtually re-focused frames after the fact, and adjust things like focal depth and focal plane to your liking, and you'll end up with a camera where nearly any problem can be fixed in post-production.
The underlying technology is all here, and has been for quite a while. The only thing missing was the terabytes of storage space needed to capture multiple HD video streams simultaneously from multiple sensors capturing at different framerates, and software that's aware of it.
Why didn't you try with an image viewer instead of a browser? The results are usually WAY better.
So when is Nokia going to release a phone?
I have a Lumia 520. Typing is a breeze. In Android, you just type, and its fine. In Windows Phone 8, when you type a word, it guesses, and throws up a list of alternatives in the header or footer that one may, or may not choose to use. Using it speeds it up quite a bit.
With Symbian, the phone would try to guess a word from the second character onwards, when one was using the numeric keypad to type, and that was painful. You would type the second character of a word, and it would try to alter the first, which was maddening. Here, in Windows Phone 8, you type a word, suggestions pop up outside the editing box, and it's up to you to decide whether to notice them or not.
In short, Microsoft lets you choose whether or not to use it. Now, if only they offered the same choice on Metro, ribbons and other such 'features'.
Because color compression doesn't exist, and hasn't been in use in every image and video format for years.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Which is considering the number of pixels of the image very little.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If the author meant that this phone could be interesting for the serious photographer he has got something wrong: Despite having all the settings of a DSLR (or a system camera for that matter) it lacks something important: Depth of Field. With smaller sensors the DOF is aleays too large to be of use. We photogs use DOF a lot on composition, it is actually very important as we can blur the background and in this way highlight the subject of the photo. Please note that composition is not set of random rules but a series of best practices meant to make the viewer know what you want to show her. This is specially important in press photography. DOF depends on the focal lenght of the lens and the sensor size (image format) and the aperture. And since the arrival of compact system cameras with good lenses and decently large sensors (damn, there's even a full frame compact out there!) the convenience of a phone-sized device is not such an important factor, even more when we consider that some cameras come with Wifi and all of the, can record video and sound.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Microsoft gives you the choice of contacts from Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail. It also ties your Hotmail/Live account w/ Skydrive, which is what it uses to store any phone settings.
Because I don't have any 40MP images on my computer, so I used this thing called the intertubes to download one.
... inline with that said in my previous post. 40MP x 4 bytes per pixels = 160MB.
The problem is CPU bound - using software to decode a 40MP jpeg isn't quick, even on a modern desktop processor.
It does, but only 2 or three times before it grinds to a halt and you require a reboot which takes about eight minutes.
Are you basing this on anything or just "LOLZ BSOD" jokes from Windows 98?
Certainly you can criticize WP for certain things, like UI, and lack of app selection, but I've never heard complaints about stability, or inability to perform basic functions. Quite the opposite. Many reviews (even from hardcore iOS and Android users) point out how stable and responsive the OS is.
My Android phone freezes and restarts once every couple weeks. After I reboot it seems to re-enumerate the SD card for 8 minutes. Once I had a phone call that I couldn't answer. I swipped to answer, and the screen responded to my swipe, but didn't actually answer. Another time it somehow went to the home screen while ringing (haven't been able to recreate this) and I had to figure out how to answer calls from the notification centre. Sometimes opening camera, dialer, or SMS takes a long time to open. iPhone isn't necessarily better. It seems to me Safari crashes once an hour.
You noticed the difference between 1450MB and 1650MB RAM usage by firefox?
I must have a magical Firefox, it's only consuming around 400MB right now.
well, firefox can't scroll facebook smoothly on a core i5, so...
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
so you can't open images downloaded from the internet in an image viewer?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.