Here’s How Good Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Camera Phone Is
The Nokia 808 PureView comes in several colors. It's heavier than your average phone, with the camera lens protruding from the back. By far its most interesting feature is the 41-megapixel camera, which takes amazing photos.
This is a view up Park Avenue in New York on a summer day. You can see the Chrysler Building in the background.
From the same picture, we zoomed in on the traffic. This is from the 12th floor of our building, and about three blocks away.
From the same picture, the Chrysler Building isn't totally clear, but we can get in pretty close.
Workers put up a billboard for The Campaign across the street from Mashable.
We can easily zoom in on the action.
Unfortunately, the zoom degrades into fuzziness at this point.
Another shot down Park Avenue, but we opted for a portrait to show the length.
A close up of pedestrians two blocks away. Again, we're 12 floors up.
A view down 23rd Street, headed east.
You can see the East River pretty clearly in this shot, taken from the previous one. It was only retouched slightly to bring up the sharpness.
New York's sea of buildings.
Zooming in from the previous shot, we can definitely see figures on the roof across the street.
Another shot of 23rd Street, now with more of the traffic visible.
A lovely rooftop patio in the middle of the city.
From the street scene, we can easily spy food vendors and pedestrians. You can also almost make out the construction writing on the street below.
Details on this building are also not too blurry, considering how far it is.
The Nokia 808 Pureview blows other cellphone cameras out of the water — but its clunky interface makes it almost not worth the effort.
Earlier this year, Nokia said it would release the 808 PureView, a phone with a 41-megapixel camera. That’s a number not found on many other cameras on the market, and Nokia claimed it would allow users to take jawdropping photos of far-off scenes that could be easily zoomed and manipulated.
Mashable put the camera to the test to see if it lived up to the promise. You can see the gallery of images from our tests above. These images were taken on the roof of the building that houses the Mashable offices in Manhattan, about 12 stories up.
As you can see from the photos, the camera is beyond anything else you’ll find on a phone. The large file sizes really allow for close crops on details of photos. While adding more megapixels doesn’t equal a better quality image, it leads to bigger files that you can do more things with in post-production.
The 808 PureView also offers far more features than you’ll find on most phones, such as white balance and autofocus. All of this is accessible from the phone’s touch screen. While this can’t compare to something like a DSLR, for users wanting to pack a high-powered point-and-shoot on their phone, it’s perfect.
Unfortunately, the interface is the phone’s biggest downfall. It’s hard to figure out how to actually get the phone’s camera into 41-megapixel mode. It’s not a default setting at all, and you have to navigate through a series of obtuse menus to change your photos’ quality and size.
Given that the phone trumpets this feature, it should be visible on the camera’s main menu. The image sizes also had meaningless names, such as “PureView” and “Full Resolution,” to differentiate them.
Not making large images the default makes sense when trying to conserve space — a 41-megapixel image is roughly 34 megabytes — but it defeats the purpose of having such a powerful camera. While it’s a great fit for a phone, it lives in a clunky ecosystem that hides its potential.
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