Nokia Puts 41MPixel Camera In a (Symbian) Phone 204
judgecorp writes "We aren't sure what's the strangest thing about Nokia's new offering, the fact that it's got a 41 Megapixel camera or the fact that it runs Symbian. It has a very high resolution sensor and uses oversampling, apparently producing good results in low light. Users can either save a maximum of 38Mpixels, or else zoom and crop for normal resolution images. Observers expected a maximum of one more Symbian phone before Nokia shifts over to Windows Phone. This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe [that] Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone."
Diffraction limited? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your average phone has a ~4 mm (diameter) lens. This yields an Airy disc [wikipedia.org] of some 1.15 minutes of arc [google.ch].
Even at a wide field of view (say, 60 degrees), this yields a maximum lateral resolution of some 3200 pixels. Isn't thus any camera with more than ~10 MPixels diffraction limited by the tiny lens, and not sensor limited?
Re:Optics (Score:5, Interesting)
That's true, but this isn't a tiny lens. The spec sheet doesn't give the actual lens size, but it does say there's a 1.5 inch sensor in there, which is a clue to the real flaw with this product. It's not really a phone with a surprisingly good camera, it's actually just a consumer level compact camera that happens to also be able to make calls. The big idea of getting rid of the optical zoom and just downsampling in the box, gaining both hardware simplicity and the advantage of averaging out noise when using less than max quality is fundamentally sound, but it probably isn't ready for real-world deployment in an actual consumer level compact camera... hence the decision to slap a phone on he back and pretend it's not a consumer level compact camera. This probably explains the decision to put symbian on it, the CPU of the camera this really ought to be probably wasn't beefy enough to run anything modern at a decent speed.