Photography Gear News

"Nokia has made the startling announcement that it has created a 41MP smartphone, the Nokia 808 PureView. Interestingly, the camera will output 3, 5MP or 8MP stills, rather than offering its full resolution - promising greater quality and offering some clever features. And this isn't a trade-show concept model, this is a product that will be offered to the public in the coming days. What's interesting isn't so much the pixel count as how it's used, so we took a closer look.

The first thing to realize is that this isn't a standard 1/3.2" mobile phone sensor, it's an unusual and remarkably large 1/1.2" type (five times larger). In fact, it's almost three times the size of the sensors in most compact cameras. As a result, its photosites are the same size as those in most 8.2MP cameraphone but the 808 doesn't try to create an image of the same quality, 5 times bigger. Instead it oversamples the image and then pixel-bins down to a smaller size (though you can output the full resolution if you wish - 38MP at 4:3 aspect ratio)"