Nokia 808 PureView Hands-On (updated with video)

[MWC 2012] I got some hands-on time with the Nokia 808 Symbian smartphone, and of course, the first (and only) thing that I wanted to look at was the 41 Megapixel camera that can capture photos as high-res as 38 Megapixels (only in 4:3 ratio). The demo was extremely interesting as the effective Megapixels of the phone could be used in a couple of different ways. Basically you can choose between the super-high resolution, or to have the Nokia software crunch all the pixels into a more Manageable 8 (or less) Megapixel image. Of course, Nokia says that it doesn’t “just shrink” the image, but that its internal software processes the image so that it can extract and use as much information as possible from the original 41 Megapixel data from the sensor.

From my perspective, this has great potential, and the demo images from Nokia (captured with the phone of course) were very convincing. Now, we really need to get in the field with one of those and capture a few photos to see how the average user (who just cares about point and shoot) can exploit this new capability.

Anyhow, this is very promising, and although I’m not really a Symbian user, I hope that this feature –if it is as good in the field as it is on the show floor- will bleed out to non-Symbian devices. Now, there’s quite a bit of software to port, so this may not make it into the Windows Phone line-up until Tango, as it has C++ support….