Nokia’s top camera specialist Damian Dinning has been answering early criticism of the market leading 12-megapixel camera on the Nokia N8. The Nokia N8 is due to be released in October and is predicted to be a flagship phone for the manufacturer in the run up to Christmas. There’s been a steady stream of leaked specs and photographs, along with official Nokia unveilings, since April.
Dinning told Nokia Conversations he wanted to answer questions being raised about the capabilities of the phone, arguing that Nokia needed to develop the biggest sensor in a mobile ever to move forwards in an increasingly competitive industry. Oh and take on digital cameras too…
Dinning said: “With the N8, we didn’t want to go backwards from the N86 8MP, only forwards [I’m referring to performance rather than megapixels], but we also need to be competitive in the industry. “For these reasons, we concluded the only way forward was to do this properly and that meant using the biggest sensor ever in a mobile.”
He went on to add: “The combination of the new Carl Zeiss optics and large image sensor gave us the best platform we’ve ever had to develop and tune image and video quality. We used this to create what we believe is the closest challenge to digital cameras.”Sharpness Vs detail
While some critics have questioned the need for a large sensor saying the images it captures are not very sharp, Dinning argues it works with Carl Zeiss optics to capture great natural detail and colours.
“Sharpness in digital imaging is more about the processing that’s been used to create a perception that the image is sharper than the optics were able to resolve it – effectively fooling your eye to think it’s better than it is,” Dinning said. “It’s a technique used in virtually all mobile devices and many, many digital cameras. It’s the detail that’s important. If you like edges to have a crisp look to them you can create that in many image editing programs.”
Why the limited zoom?
Dinning argued that concerns over the camera only having a 2x digital zoom in photographs and 3x digital zoom in video were misplaced, claiming Nokia is protecting image quality rather than limiting functionality.Image taken by a Nokia N8 on Nokia Conversations
Dinning said: “In the case of stills, we capped the zoom at a point where we felt the image quality was still usable. But honestly speaking, going much beyond this only reduces image quality. Of course, though, there are on-device editing tools for cropping, etc. which you may prefer to use.”
While you can zoom further in video, which is HD by the way, and get the extra detail still you will start getting a little more noise.
Isn’t it a bit silly to not have a lens cover on such a high-end camera phone?
There’s been a fair bit of complaining that the Nokia N8 does not have a mechanical lens cover. Dinning said that Nokia had to measure the pros and cons of having a cover and look at alternatives if the latter outweighs the former.
In the end it was decided that adding a cover would have made the phone too big and impacted on the layout of the phone’s other components.
Instead, Nokia chose to multi-coat the glass and make it “heavily scratch resistant”.
What else did Dinning say about the Nokia N8s 12-megapixel camera?
Response timesImage taken by a Nokia N8 on Nokia Conversations
The Nokia N8 camera’s response times are faster: shutter lag is down to 150ms, the viewfinder lag is down to around 100ms and the focus time is around 2350ms.
Ssssshhhh … no noise reduction needed on video
Not only does the Nokia N8 have HD video recording, the high resolution also means noise is greatly reduced on video.
Dinning said: “When recording video – due to the high resolution sensor – we take advantage of pixel binning to reduce noise
“In reasonable lighting conditions, we’re able to completely disable noise reduction for video as a result which allows us to retain maximum sharpness but with very low noise.”
Taking pictures anytime, anywhere – the N8s impressive flash rangeImage taken by a Nokia N8 on Nokia Conversations
Dinning says in typical conditions, a range of 3-3.5m is achievable – although this range could be lower outside at night, it’s sometimes higher indoors where light can reflect off walls and ceilings.
The “impressive” flash range is another reason for the Nokia N8s great attention to detail.
AMOLED display
Once upon a time there was such a thing as an OLED screen. And while some praised it, others said that it didn’t work so well in bright light. But I have to say it’s time for people to get over the whole display quality issue because now we have AMOLED and it really is great.
As Dinning says: “First, this newer display is much brighter than previous OLED displays. In certain situations, it’s up to almost 60 per cent brighter! And second, there is an anti-reflection film applied to the display.” AMOLED screens can display photos brilliantly, my only fear is that the likes of Samsung are already using SuperAMOLED, which trumps normal AMOLED, making the display technology on the Nokia N8 seem dated, if perfectly adequate.