6 ms·

Nokia Unveils Symbian 41 Megapixel Camera Phone

39 points by pbahra 15y ago

StavrosK 15y ago
My phone can do infinite resolution, I just stick the image in the Gimp and resize it to however large I want. What the hell, sensationalist title?
- jhdevos 15y ago
  No, this phone will actually have a 41MP sensor. It will typically produce 5 or 8MP images, though, downsampling the original image, resulting in a lot lower noise than with a normal 5 or 8MP camera-on-a-phone. It really sounds pretty neat.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Oh, sorry, I thought they were doing the opposite (upsampling to 41 MP from 5MP effective).
    - klodolph 15y ago
      To be fair, that's what every webcam on the market does. (Logitech advertises 5 MP photos from a 1280x720 sensor on the C310. They're more than doubling the resolution in software.)
- Geee 15y ago
  The sensor is 41MP. Read the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3638189 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3638189 Full-res samples: http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-conte...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nodata 15y ago
It's that time again - anyone got good suggestions on how to represent photo quality with a single number?
- wisty 15y ago
  Sensor size?
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    No question mark required, that definitely is your best single number, IMO. The 808 has a sensor size of 1/1.2", which is 2.5 times better than the typical point and shoot camera, 8 times better than iPhone 4S.
    - wisty 15y ago
      Wow. That's huge. I prefer just comparing the square of area (so it's only 4 times as good as a 4S), but still ... wow. By my standard, it's 90% the quality of a u4/3. 81% the area. Close to a full frame D5 than an iPhone.
      - bryanlarsen 15y ago
        Your math is wrong. (So was mine). Fallen schooled me here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639080 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639080
- zokier 15y ago
  Resolving power. Take a photo of test pattern, and measure how many lines/mm you can see.
  - klodolph 15y ago
    Resolving power at various f-stops + noise at various gain settings (ISO speeds) + available dynamic range + color gamut, although the color gamut available is likely more than you need.
Gravityloss 15y ago
Hooray, in the end they can go to no pesky lens at all since image quality can be improved infinitely by adding more pixels. Using a pinhole does away with that focusing too. ;) To be serious, I'm more of a physics guy. Photon "shot" (think shotgun with fewer and fewer pellets) noise determines already the lower limit of noise and (having a certain fixed shutter speed which is defined by avoiding movement) the only way you get more photons from the same subject is more lens area. Maybe you can filter a little better if you have more pixels. I'd imagine the dynamic range sucks though if each pixel is so small that it saturates quickly. So, if you're shopping for a camera, what determines how your photos come out in anything but the brightest sunlight is actually the lens. You should be shopping primarily for a good (read large aperture) lens, with a decent camera attached / bundled. Or if you want to go further, a system that is offering good lenses.
- klodolph 15y ago
  > I'd imagine the dynamic range sucks though if each pixel is so small that it saturates quickly. Well, if you replace a single sensor with four sensors that saturate more easily, observe that the chance that all four sensors saturate may be less than the chance that the original, larger sensor saturates. Answering the question, "how much light actually fell on these four sensors" becomes a more difficult problem and may yield greater error but is still tractable. For you with a math background: Let X_i be the amount of light that actually falls on sensor i, for i=1..4, and let e_i be the amount of uncorrelated noise. The sensor readouts are Y_i, where Y_i = min(X_i + e_i, sat) and sat is the saturation. Let X=sum(X_i). We know that X and each X_i follow approximately a Poisson distribution and we wish to know the parameter of the distribution for X. Obviously, if Y_i = sat for all i then we are SOL. However, if not, then we can always use some kind of reasonable estimator for the desired parameter.
  - Gravityloss 15y ago
    Well, say you take a back-lighted image of a person against the sky. Your camera software chooses the shutter speed, aperture and iso sensitivity according to some formula like average lighting in the scene. But the real world has such huge dynamics so that basically either the whole sky is washed out or then you can't make out the person's face. So basically all the pixels where the sky light falls on, oversaturate. If you lower the shutter speed, sensitivity and aperture so that the sky stays just below saturation, then you conversely catch very very few photons from the person. The person may appear pitch black or at best, really noisy, since the photons are so few. With noise, you often actually get color noise since because of the Bayer mask, the single photons hit random color pixels here and there. It looks really bad and cheap. Actually, that's the tell tale sign of low dynamic range and tiny pixels. What do people do with even 12 megapixel 4000x3000 images? I'd settle with 2000x1500 - still greater than any resolution on any of the screens I own, and the dynamic range could potentially be better. The full res images look really bad and noisy anyway. Actually, most of internet's picture content is just too large photos which for the most part don't contain any useful information: below some resolution you are just recording noise. I've set my compact to 5 megapixels. Yet we haven't seen the end of wasted bit proportion. Phones recording full HD video and later 4K and 8K will explode the data demands a thousand times. Everybody will watch those resized to much smaller resolutions too.
krobertson 15y ago
No picture of the phone? If they unveiled it, then you'd think there'd be a picture of it.
- teyc 15y ago
  Pics here http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview-launch-pictures-video-preview http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview... It is quite bulky.
- indy 15y ago
  The Verge has some photos of the phone: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview-launch-pictures-video-preview http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview...
Juha 15y ago
"The phone uses a technique that Nokia calls over-sampling, to produce crystal clear, noiseless images with an effective resolution of 5 megapixels." At first this sentence made me think it might be just a marketing trick, but seeing the sensor size I see there might be something truly innovative here. I first thought the sensor size must be a mistake, 1/1.2" huge, it is larger than any point&shoot camera (biggest ones are 1/1.5" like Canon G1-X) and its area is ~60% of normal DSLR sensor area. But still the 41MP sounds huge, it remains to be seen how much that MP count affects the actual image resolution. Maybe Nokia should just start making P&S cameras if it's really that good.

39 points by pbahra 15y ago

My phone can do infinite resolution, I just stick the image in the Gimp and resize it to however large I want. What the hell, sensationalist title?

jhdevos 15y ago
No, this phone will actually have a 41MP sensor. It will typically produce 5 or 8MP images, though, downsampling the original image, resulting in a lot lower noise than with a normal 5 or 8MP camera-on-a-phone. It really sounds pretty neat.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Oh, sorry, I thought they were doing the opposite (upsampling to 41 MP from 5MP effective).
  - klodolph 15y ago
    To be fair, that's what every webcam on the market does. (Logitech advertises 5 MP photos from a 1280x720 sensor on the C310. They're more than doubling the resolution in software.)
Geee 15y ago
The sensor is 41MP. Read the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3638189 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3638189 Full-res samples: http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-conte...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nodata 15y ago

It's that time again - anyone got good suggestions on how to represent photo quality with a single number?

wisty 15y ago
Sensor size?
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  No question mark required, that definitely is your best single number, IMO. The 808 has a sensor size of 1/1.2", which is 2.5 times better than the typical point and shoot camera, 8 times better than iPhone 4S.
  - wisty 15y ago
    Wow. That's huge. I prefer just comparing the square of area (so it's only 4 times as good as a 4S), but still ... wow. By my standard, it's 90% the quality of a u4/3. 81% the area. Close to a full frame D5 than an iPhone.
    - bryanlarsen 15y ago
      Your math is wrong. (So was mine). Fallen schooled me here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639080 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639080
zokier 15y ago
Resolving power. Take a photo of test pattern, and measure how many lines/mm you can see.
- klodolph 15y ago
  Resolving power at various f-stops + noise at various gain settings (ISO speeds) + available dynamic range + color gamut, although the color gamut available is likely more than you need.

Gravityloss 15y ago

Hooray, in the end they can go to no pesky lens at all since image quality can be improved infinitely by adding more pixels. Using a pinhole does away with that focusing too. ;) To be serious, I'm more of a physics guy. Photon "shot" (think shotgun with fewer and fewer pellets) noise determines already the lower limit of noise and (having a certain fixed shutter speed which is defined by avoiding movement) the only way you get more photons from the same subject is more lens area. Maybe you can filter a little better if you have more pixels. I'd imagine the dynamic range sucks though if each pixel is so small that it saturates quickly. So, if you're shopping for a camera, what determines how your photos come out in anything but the brightest sunlight is actually the lens. You should be shopping primarily for a good (read large aperture) lens, with a decent camera attached / bundled. Or if you want to go further, a system that is offering good lenses.

klodolph 15y ago
> I'd imagine the dynamic range sucks though if each pixel is so small that it saturates quickly. Well, if you replace a single sensor with four sensors that saturate more easily, observe that the chance that all four sensors saturate may be less than the chance that the original, larger sensor saturates. Answering the question, "how much light actually fell on these four sensors" becomes a more difficult problem and may yield greater error but is still tractable. For you with a math background: Let X_i be the amount of light that actually falls on sensor i, for i=1..4, and let e_i be the amount of uncorrelated noise. The sensor readouts are Y_i, where Y_i = min(X_i + e_i, sat) and sat is the saturation. Let X=sum(X_i). We know that X and each X_i follow approximately a Poisson distribution and we wish to know the parameter of the distribution for X. Obviously, if Y_i = sat for all i then we are SOL. However, if not, then we can always use some kind of reasonable estimator for the desired parameter.
- Gravityloss 15y ago
  Well, say you take a back-lighted image of a person against the sky. Your camera software chooses the shutter speed, aperture and iso sensitivity according to some formula like average lighting in the scene. But the real world has such huge dynamics so that basically either the whole sky is washed out or then you can't make out the person's face. So basically all the pixels where the sky light falls on, oversaturate. If you lower the shutter speed, sensitivity and aperture so that the sky stays just below saturation, then you conversely catch very very few photons from the person. The person may appear pitch black or at best, really noisy, since the photons are so few. With noise, you often actually get color noise since because of the Bayer mask, the single photons hit random color pixels here and there. It looks really bad and cheap. Actually, that's the tell tale sign of low dynamic range and tiny pixels. What do people do with even 12 megapixel 4000x3000 images? I'd settle with 2000x1500 - still greater than any resolution on any of the screens I own, and the dynamic range could potentially be better. The full res images look really bad and noisy anyway. Actually, most of internet's picture content is just too large photos which for the most part don't contain any useful information: below some resolution you are just recording noise. I've set my compact to 5 megapixels. Yet we haven't seen the end of wasted bit proportion. Phones recording full HD video and later 4K and 8K will explode the data demands a thousand times. Everybody will watch those resized to much smaller resolutions too.

krobertson 15y ago

No picture of the phone? If they unveiled it, then you'd think there'd be a picture of it.

teyc 15y ago
Pics here http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview-launch-pictures-video-preview http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview... It is quite bulky.
indy 15y ago
The Verge has some photos of the phone: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview-launch-pictures-video-preview http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview...

Juha 15y ago

"The phone uses a technique that Nokia calls over-sampling, to produce crystal clear, noiseless images with an effective resolution of 5 megapixels." At first this sentence made me think it might be just a marketing trick, but seeing the sensor size I see there might be something truly innovative here. I first thought the sensor size must be a mistake, 1/1.2" huge, it is larger than any point&shoot camera (biggest ones are 1/1.5" like Canon G1-X) and its area is ~60% of normal DSLR sensor area. But still the 41MP sounds huge, it remains to be seen how much that MP count affects the actual image resolution. Maybe Nokia should just start making P&S cameras if it's really that good.