Nokia 808 PureView has only 8 megapixel real sensor?

I was reading about Nokia 808 PureView in which I read that it will have a 41 megapixel camera. At first I was surprised because, I never heard about any normal digital camera having such a large amount of megapixels. Also to have such a huge camera in a smartphone, it would take a good effort. After researching about the 41 megapixel camera I found out that it actually has sensors of just 8 megapixels and not 41 megapixels. I couldn’t understand much of it in detail, but would like to know about it. Can someone tell me in detail?

Yes, you are right, the super high resolution 41 megapixels that we see are achieved due to high performance Carl Zeiss optics that is used in Nokia 808 PureView. Using this technology, the developers have clustered multiple pixels into one pixel to achieve a high quality zooming and image capturing which will give lossless pictures. Also due to this technology, the pictures taken in low lit area will also be of good quality. Nokia 808 PureView is the first smartphone to implement this technology. This camera doesn’t include the scaling and the interpolation techniques for zooming into the picture as used by most of the cameras in the smartphones. It actually moves the lenses of the camera s back and front to achieve the magnification and adjust the field of view for the view in front of it.

If you want to know how this whole 41 megapixel camera stuff works, then the first thing that you should know is that the resolution of 7728 x 5368 pixels for 41 megapixels. You will be able to record the videos in this resolution until you change the aspect ratio for the picture. The aspect ratio when changed will become 7728 x 4354 pixels for 16:9 images and videos and 7152 x 5368 pixels for 4:3 images and videos. This is the full resolution of camera and will give you the some resolution for images and videos until you zoom the camera. This camera supports 4x zoom and once you start zooming, the resolution of the image reduces due to magnification. In Nokia N8, the zoom was restricted to 2x to retain the quality of the image. But here in Nokia 808 PureView, the scaling won’t be done for whole view. Instead you will be choosing a small area on which the sensors of the camera will focus. Thus at 4x zoom, 3072 x 1728 pixels out of 7152 x 5368 pixels will only work to give a zooming effect.

Usually in the normal cameras that are used in the phones gives a grainy effect in the picture due to which there is loss in quality of the picture. This is known as the pixel oversampling. In this technique, multiple pixels are combined to form a single pixel known as super pixel. This reduces the grainy effect and retains the quality of the picture.

The grainy effect in the general cameras used to reduce the quality of the image when clicked in low lit areas. So now that in day time, under the sun, you will be able to click crystal clear pictures without any disturbances and under low light, the picture will still retain its quality. When you don’t zoom, the oversampling remains full, but you do the full zoom, this oversampling is reduced and resulting into low quality picture. The camera is designed to maintain the perfect balance for zooming and oversampling of the images.

Due to the high quality of the camera, the softness and the sharpness of the objects and the colors on an object will be properly retained without any disturbance or distortion. Even without zooming, the camera will adjust itself slightly to get the perfect depth and purity in the image.

The camera won’t go on zooming till 1x or 2x, but will simply adjust itself to adjust where needed. Also the best part of this camera is that with all this high level megapixels and oversampling, the camera is physically 70% smaller than the general digital camera with optical zoom design. Usually, many cameras fail to have proper quality of RGB in its captured pictures, but here in Nokia 808 PureView, the proportions of the RGB are well maintained without any mismatch mixing.

Usually the mobile phones and the smartphones with cameras have low focal length. This is fine for capturing pictures of people in front of them, but it becomes difficult to capture the wide landscapes or people in wide are properly. One has to adjust their position to get the wide area right into the frame.

But with big size of view that Nokia 808 PureView provides, the field of view is also big. To provide this, the camera of this smartphone comes with longer focal length (8.02mm) with large f/2.4 aperture. The developers of Nokia 808 PureView have concentrated on the quality of the camera rather than the quantity. Many other manufacturers of the phones with camera have concentrated on the physical size of the camera.

They have tried to reduce the physical size of it to make it unnoticeable on the phone’s body. The camera will cover a large part of the phone and there is no hiding it.

the sensors for the camera used in Nokia 808 PureView is around 2.5 times larger than that in Nokia N8. This large size of the sensors will help to collect large amount of photons of light over a large area. The resolution of video that this camera will provide is large enough to be displayed on a television, monitor of a computer or on the display of the smartphone or tablet PC.

So if you captu7re a large are in your camera, then it you will also be given option to crop the video or image. With the clarity and purity that it provides, not need to go closer to object to get a clear view.

I liked the silent zooming feature of the camera. Usually we have seen that if we try to click the picture of an object that is very small, we need to take the camera closer to the object. This leads to over focusing on the dark area, especially the shadow of the object. So to adjust for such photos, the camera of Nokia 808 PureView will silently zoom in and zoom out to adjust to the dark areas and the bright area. This will help to focus on the object that is important and ignore other parts in the view. This zooming won’t be noticed, but its effect will be seen. I say that best photography can be done by using the camera on low megapixels. This will preserve the quality much better and anyhow, we aren’t going to print anything in size more than A4.

With so much talked about the quality of the picture that the camera of Nokia 808 PureView can capture is done. Let me tell you that, even the sound quality of this smartphone is very good. It can record as well as produce high quality of audio. It can record audio up to 110 db without any disturbance or distortion. It can also record sounds up to 140 to 150 db, but afterwards some amount of processing is required on it again. So with Nokia 808 PureView, you can easily create a VCD like quality of a film easily.