Am I a camera or a phone? Well these days people are calling these mega phones with mega mega pixel cameras, “camera phones”. Just to get the statistics out of the way, this camera phone has an incredible 41 megapixel camera with auto focus, face detection, geo tagging, self timer, digital zoom, Carl Zeis lens, image oversampling, lossless zoom and a 1280 or 720 pixels HD video recording capability.
I don’t want to mention the phone side of things, although it is quite impressive with great connectivity and a Nokia bred Symbian OS, (to each their own), but instead I want to “focus” on the incredible camera.
Nokia has leapt ahead in camera phone technology perfecting the use of software interpolation. In essence the sampling of information. The genius lies in the fact that Nokia does not want to centre on the size of your image at 41MP but rather the quality and detail. Therefore your image will get re sampled down to a 5mp or 8mp image, although it can output an effective 38mp photo if you really wanted to. The advantages are that inside this image the tightly packed pixels serve up great colour, and clarity and essentially can offer a roughly 2.8x ‘zoom,’ while maintaining 5MP output. When you get that image in your pc or tv and zoom in you will now have a virtually lossless image. When you want to print, go ahead – there will definitely be no quality loss even at A4 size. This is what the average person needs anyway.
Without getting too excited – I can see how this could finally solve the issue of your mobile & camera together on vacation. Sure it lacks much of what many semi pro cameras can do, but it beats the daylights out of most “point and shoot” cameras. I believe that the identity crisis is easily solved, as Nokia has gravitated towards making cameras and left the “great mobile wars”, the smart phones to the likes of Apple & Android – and all those that house their OS.
So far this Nokia has the biggest Mp camera in the world and its the one to beat!!
What do you think? Would you get rid of your “point & shoot” camera and replace your mobile? Let us know!
(Available around mid May for about 500.00 UK pounds)
J.I – Senior Mediazone Officer
(Images courtesy of Nokia Europe)
