News - Nokia 808 PureView image quality comparisons

[HEXUS]

Beats many compact cameras in tests. PureView 808 available in USA and UK soon.

Read more.

[krazy_olie]

tempting

[directhex]

Yeah, but a £500 phone running Symbian?

[cheesemp]

Looks nice but does the average user need such quality? After all most pics just end up on facebook nowadays. Very happy with my note's average 8 mega pixels photos (even printed they look great). Also I wouldn't touch Symbian with a barge pole now (and yes I did use to be a Symbian fan - 3 Symbian phones).

[crossy]

Yeah, but a £500 phone running Symbian?

£500 phone is bad enough, but one running Symbian is a joke. Come on Nokia, do a Lumia with this camera hardware - then at least you'd have a chance of having a phone to match the camera.

Or, and here's a thought, offer that fancy camera to other phone manufacturers (especially, cough, cough, Samsung).

Nice to see GSMArena's survey support what I thought - namely that the SIII's camera is - by far - the worst aspect of what is otherwise a pretty decent high end device.

Although to stand up for the Lumix, cNet's article carefully avoided any situation that would have brought into play optical zoom etc. Presumably because doing so would remind the smartphone-happy readership that irrespective of how good a sensor it has, a smartphone is NOT a digital camera, so can't call on the features that a proper optical stage brings. So - to me at least - a smartphone is good for those "just gotta get a pic" moments, but I still prefer a proper digicam for anything I want to keep.

[Noxvayl]

Now if they could work on this technology to get it into a device for less than £300 they can resurrect their ailing business. I would like to see this paired with the MeeGo OS personally, I was looking forward to MeeGo powered phones from Nokia...

[jonjungle]

Don't the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 4S share the exact same camera???

[warejon9]

Don't the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 4S share the exact same camera???

It might be the same hardware, however its the processing that would have an effect, the iPhone is notorious for over saturating photos making them "look" nicer to some people. Also the reason why they can't do a lumia version atm, is that it took 5years to develop (hence why on symbian) and that atm windows phone is very locked down to what you can use, so the dedicated chip for the photo processing wouldn't work.
Finally for it being on symbian, yea its a shame, but most of the most used apps are on it, symbian has changed a lot since the S^3 release. Atm symbian belle fp1 is incredibly smooth and responsive to use which is amazing considering its on a single core processor.

[Brewster0101]

Does make you wonder why Nokia didn't use Windows on this phone? Lack of faith perhaps!

[lodore]

Does make you wonder why Nokia didn't use Windows on this phone? Lack of faith perhaps!

It was most likely under development for quite sometime and to change OS would of delayed it due to extra testing. Think about how much time its taking companies to upgrade their phones from android 2.3 to 4.

[crossy]

Don't the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 4S share the exact same camera???

Yep, it's the same hardware (widely reported), and it would appear that Apple has been a bit better at actually using it.

Stomps off angrily looking for something to kick...

[krazy_olie]

Unless you are app happy I would expect it to be quite functional as as a phone.

[anselhelm]

Yeah, but a £500 phone running Symbian?

£500 phone is bad enough, but one running Symbian is a joke. Come on Nokia, do a Lumia with this camera hardware - then at least you'd have a chance of having a phone to match the camera.

I completely agree here. This is just pure Nokia all over, missing out on another great opportunity.

Imagine if Nokia bundled that camera with the highest-end Windows Phone 7 they are allowed to make for the same price. Consumers would eat that up.

As it stands, that's a great camera stuck on a crap phone.

[Gkpm]

Don't the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 4S share the exact same camera???

No, it's definitely not the same camera:

"we have seen some reports suggesting that we found it to be the same sensor as found in the iPhone 4S. The bond pad arrangement is not the same as the IMX145 found in the iPhone4S nor is it the same as the IMX105 found in previous Samsung phones. The initial opinion (subject to more analysis) is that the sensor is new."

http://www.chipworks.com/en/technica...g-galaxy-siii/

[crossy]

Unless you are app happy I would expect it to be quite functional as as a phone.

smartphone - app store support = failure

Imagine if Nokia bundled that camera with the highest-end Windows Phone 7 they are allowed to make for the same price. Consumers would eat that up.

Maybe Microsoft should be leaning on Nokia (hard!) to do exactly that. Imagine a "Lumia X" with dual-core (yes I know WP7 is fine with single core) so it's blisteringly fast; nice, large AMOLED screen (4.3-4.5"); that PureView camera; and some really neat styling. Oh, and no nonsense like fixed memory or battery (especially the latter).

Launch that at MWC2013 and it might persuade me to sell my SIII and defect from Android. Especially if it was upgradable to WP8 (or shipped with WP8).

[Barkotron]

Nice to see GSMArena's survey support what I thought - namely that the SIII's camera is - by far - the worst aspect of what is otherwise a pretty decent high end device.

But the survey doesn't support that at all. They tallied ONLY the posts stating which set of photos were the "best". There's no ranking by preference here.

So 6% thought the iphone was best, 4% thought the Samsung was best. That's got to be well within margin of error for a survey like this. Most of the replies on the thread were generally Olympus/Nokia about the same, iphone/Samsung about the same. If you actually go and look at the photos themselves there's really not much to choose between the Samsung and the iphone - there's just a wider field of view on the S3 and the saturation is a bit different. I just don't see how you can claim support for whatever hobbyhorse you have about the camera on the S3 from that survey. If anything the survey shows that the S3 camera is "about the same" as the camera on the iphone 4S, which is generally thought of as right up there when it comes to phone cams.

In a survey with 913 results, 570 people thought the Nokia 808 took the best pictures, 243 thought the Olympus did, 56 thought the iphone did, 39 thought the Samsung did. Only 5 people voted for the Nokia N8, which is downright weird - the N8 photos are certainly no worse (I think they're better) than the iphone/S3 ones. Can only think that people who recognised the N8 as being good photos also recognised that the Olympus/808 were both better.

I'd love to know which out of the Olympus and the 808 had the best colour. As far as I can see that's pretty much the only difference between them: the Olympus is a bit warmer, but otherwise they're very close in detail etc. I'd love to see someone from GSMArena say which one of the photos is actually closer to reality.

What was surprising though was just how bad the HTC was - the 100% crops on GSMArena are really, really awful. After reading reviews stating the camera was good I was very surprised. I thought they'd got over their problems with cameras (my wife's old Desire was practically unusably bad).