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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."
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.
What are they trying to imply with this statement, "...offers virtually all of the controls you'd find in a DSLR camera"? Kind of a way to trick people into thinking it's DSLR-quality which is BS. 22MP is nice but how is it's low-light abilities and dynamic range? Seems like marketing hype...
Does it sync with Mac OSX Contacts and Calendar? Without handing over my data to Google (share Google calendar ...)?
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.
The context of the article notes controls "like you'd find in any DSLR camera." These controls allow you to actually affect image capture settings. Nokia didn't use that to "trick" people into anything. They just gave users more control over settings. The reality is, the camera and app are the best for any camera phone on the market now, but yet, it's still a built-in smartphone camera, albeit a really good one for what it is.
If they're as good as the Lumia 925 (and I assume they are), they're damned good. Far better than my Galaxy S3. Definitely not DSLR good, but damned good, nonetheless. At a recent concert, I was impressed how well it handled the stage lighting and everything. Many other phones didn't fare nearly as well as mine did. I did end up wishing I'd picked up a 1020 instead, as the performer's face was completely lacking any detail at the distance I was at.
sure? This phone has optical image stabilisation. One of the elements in the lens floats - hence "floating image stabilization"
Samsung has been showing serious cameras that have phone functions, standard phones which have been outclassing Nokia in general reviews and real optical zoom cameras with most smartphone features. Nokia traditionally lead in phone cameras and when the original Pureview 808 came out it looked pretty neat.
Now Nokia which has contracts that leave it trapped with windows they are desperate to get some of the 808's shine back. They know that users who already used a Windows phone won't do it again so they have to look for new audiences. Aiming to sucker in camera users who they hope won't check app availability let alone how up to date the apps in the app store are is one of their better chances.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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?
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.
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."
http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/07/11/nokia-lumia-1020-picture-gallery-zoom-in/ this picture seems to be close (first one of the city)
or you could have used a image search engine to find it yourself... but i guess that is too much to expect, it is after all easier to just complain about something regardless of the truth
Seems to me that choppy response is a standard Android complaint, particularly from those who do not have quad core. Those weren't Apple customers complaining about lag, either, they were older device customers complaining about performance after iOS upgrades. Cores are not the problem there.
Of course, quad core means worse battery life as well, along with slower recharge times that come with the larger batteries.
Funny how people seek out information to confirm their prejudices.
The ignorance on /. is astounding.
Oh come on, are you trying to sell sh.t for Microsoft? DSLR would have aperture priority mode, shutter priority and full manual mode, not the "ISO, white balance is all there".
Does this Windows phone crap needs to forced on people so badly that paid for "reviews" are not sufficient and now Slashdot is needed for that too?
The problem is they didn't just say "like you'd find in any DSLR camera." the summary said "virtually all of the controls you'd find in a DSLR camera." This is a laughable comment at best. It does not offer fine control over shutter aperture in different priority modes, fully manual control, bracketing, manual AF, viewfinder grid, horizon level, etc that you find standard in nearly all DSLRs on the market and many point and shoots. No I have seen many point and shoots that give more controls than what this offers.
Is it a good step forward? Yes. Is the sentence comparing it's controls to that of an actual camera justified? Hell no.
Actually, it DOES have the following that you note... "shutter aperture, manual AF, bracketing and viewfinder grid"... so what's laughable?
Oh come on, are you trying to sell sh.t for Microsoft?
Windows 8 got a 10-digit marketing budget. Of course there's shills everywhere.
Microsoft is desperate, and they're failing in every market they have to compete in. The only thing propping them up is enterprise, and every IT manager with a clue is looking at how to gracefully escape from that particular trap.
These phones are basically uninteresting niche products that don't work well enough to succeed even in their niche. Too little too late basically, like most recent Microsoft products.
I have a Nokia 808 PureView. It does all this without being infected with Windows.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
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.
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'.