Digital Home Thoughts: Nokia Announces 808 Pureview with 41 Megapixel Sensor, Attempts to Take On Nikon's D800

"The headline feature is the 41 megapixel oversampling system implemented on a huge 1/1.2" sensor, enabling standard resolution photos to be produced yet with dramatic zooming (24-74mm) available without loss of detail, and with lower digital noise."

Normally I do not post phone news, but I found this to be hilarious. Nokia has implemented a 41 megapixel sensor in their latest phone, with a f/2.4 lens that just covers slightly less than the sensor area to allow recording in 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratios without losing megapixels. The final maximum file sizes appear to contain about 36 megapixels of information.

What Nokia has done is to make a sensor that is 75% the size of Nikon's CX format as used in the Nikon 1 system (the official literature pegs the size at 1/1.2") and pack it with photosites as dense as a normal phone's camera. Result? Lots of pixels. It is also quite clever in a way, because that means at normal file sizes with five to eight megapixels, the camera can perform a crop to mimic a zoom without loss of detail. This avoids a bulky optical zoom mechanism in this day of sub-10mm phones. However I do suspect Nokia knows the quality might not stand up to close scrutiny, as the samples so far minimise the camera's weaknesses. The EXIF data has the camera as low as ISO 50 in some of the samples! More details of this crazy camera phone at the link, with links to full-sized samples in the linked article's comments section.