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."
Optics (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless it has a DSLR-type lens, the limitation is going to be optics, not resolution.
-taktoa
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Look at the sample shots. 41MP be damned, those photos look goooooood.
http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip [amazonaws.com]
Me likey...
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You think so? I just see vibrant colors, not 41megapixels detail. With a clear blue sky like that, and plenty of light, you minimize the problems of small sensors/lenses.
It is known that you can print up to A3 size with a 6 MP camera. So the only advantage would be when using digital zoom. If I zoom in those images I see a noisy sky. Sure, it can be a problem with jpg format. But in any case, the same picture could have been obtained with a 6MP camera.
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Those are nice shots, but they were also taken by a professional photographer in perfect lighting conditions. The ability of the average user to reproduce these will be reduced to "Happy Accident."
Now, a person with a good eye for composition and lighting will be able to turn out some pretty nice stuff on a consistent basis, and if you're looking to be able to make calls and play Angry Birds on your camera, more power to you.
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Hmmm, good point. My Galaxy Nexus take barely usable shots in broad daylight but churns out murky crap at night... maybe it really is time for a bigger camera.
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Pretty much this. An iPhone (which, until the 4S had spectacularly bad cameras) can take good pictures under optimal conditions. ANYTHING can take good pictures under optimal conditions. Especially if you're looking at it on Facebook on some random browser at 400 pixels across.
Have the light wash out, have the subject move, put the subject close or far away, print poster size - then you're pushing hardware.
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What exactly is wrong with them? Can you point out something?
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Yup, there's a physical limit to how much light you can get through a lens the size of your pinky nail and all the megapixels in the world won't change that.
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.
Not for taking 38 Megapixel - for 5 megapixel (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is not to take 38 megapixel images. I don't know why everyone is focusing on the megapixel, that is not the story here.
The story here is the approach they take, 41 megapixel oversampled images processed algorithmically to produce superior 5 mega pixel images. The story may even be Symbian, definitely not the 41 mega pixel sensor.
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I think people are focusing on the overkill of 38 megapixel image on a camera phone. Sure, it's kind of cool from a technological perspective, but from a practical standpoint, considering the limitations of aperture, focal length, optic distortion, etc., constrained within the tiny framework of a phone is pretty pointless - even Zeiss optics have their limitations. Also, as mentioned previously, one can only allow so much light into a small and tiny lens (which is limited by the form factor of the size of t
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But I don't think you can have it all on your cell (I wished a F/1.4 11mm-5000mm lens but that would be kind of bulky - if possible).
To me, the news come down to
1. The bandwidth of the sensor to pull all that data out in a "fair experience" for the user
1.b. The embedded processing capabilities (DSP, etc)
2. The capability of analyzing a 41 megapixel image, with fairly low noise
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3. A fairly good quality digital zoom that can crop 41MP to 4.1MP to avoid more complex optical zoom mechanisms.
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You don't need the digital zoom - that's what all the pickles are for. Just subsample. That allows you to have simpler, better lens. Zooming is faster. It allows the 'photographer' to decide what to do with the picture later. That's important in these miserable little 'cameras' since the form factor and lack of a decent viewfinder make it hard to compose, especially when the subject is busy yorking up all the Doritos in the corner. Gotta get that special moment!
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I'm glad you put photographer in quotes.
Not too many pixels in fact. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually since this is a near diffraction limited lens working at f/2.4 the spot size is going to be about 0.56um * 2.4 ~ 1.344um on the focal plane. The cycle size is about double, or 2.688um.
Considering it uses a Bayer array, and the pixels are spaced at 1.4um, the green pixels will be spaced at 2um (minimum distance to next green pixel). To properly sample you need at least 2 pixels per cycle (said Mr. Nyquist), but since pixels are not exactly points (they have an area) astronomers working in diffraction limited imaging advise 3x sampling in practice.
What this means is you would need a pixel size of 2.688/3/sqrt(2) ~ 0.63um (or 0.9um if using a Foven-style sensor) to properly sample this lens. 1.4um vastly undersamples the lens, as can be seen near the central area in the available samples: they are razor sharp in the central area, and otherwise are limited by aberrations.
A practical article describing this, with example images, can be seen here:
http://samirkharusi.net/sampling_saturn.html
Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek (Score:5, Informative)
"This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone"
Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
Re:Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek (Score:5, Informative)
Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
I can't find now the link (maybe it was on a video), but they say they have been developing this technology for four years.
And BTW, the summary is somewhat unfair. On the announcement [nokia.com] they have posted (besides some impressive photo samples) a whitepaper [nokia.com] were they clearly say that is not about quantity of megapixels, is about the quality you get when you average the results given by each one. I've also seen some of the videos were you get a very smooth digital zoom without loss of quality, and is quite remarkable.
Re:Or perhaps this isn't Star Trek (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is there some modern variant of Godwin's law that applies whenever you mention Steve Jobs or Apple in an unrelated conversation?
iGod's law?
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Is there some modern variant of Godwin's law that applies whenever you mention Steve Jobs or Apple in an unrelated conversation?
I'm just making informed and estute observations like the rest of the pack... sometimes I just get tired of pretending to be a mobile phone market analyst.
"Observers expected a maximum of one more Symbian" (Score:2)
Question is.. (Score:2)
Is it really pixels or is it phonus balonus theoretical pixels?
I have and Olympus FE-47 cheepie "14 megapixel" which has worse actual resolution than my old Nikon Coolpix 800, which only is 1 megapixel.
Re:Question is.. (Score:4, Informative)
Sensor is much larger than a traditional 5MP phone cam sensor:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/02/27/Nokia-808-PureView-with-41MP-sensor
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Note also that the samples were all "wide-angle" - the "telephoto" is not optical - basically just using a subset of the sensor to do it electronically. So makes the device much simpler (no moving parts), but in essence is d
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Reading the article, it states that the sensor size is 1.5 inches. (38.1mm) If we assume that the measurement is like other camera sensors, that is the diagonal measurement and a little trig tells us that we can get a ~27mm a side right triangle from that, which is on par with APS-C sensors, or most DSLRs in production today.
The smearing is probably coming from the focal distance between the lens and the sensor and a fixed aperture. Unless there is something they aren't telling us, the lens has to be focuse
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And let me reply to my own post here. The whitepaper says the sensor is going to be 10x7mm, which is a little under half an inch diagonal. Nothing about that sensor can equal 38mm, so I'm wondering which measurement is a misprint.
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http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf [nokia.com]
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According to the product briefing, it's actually very odd. There really are 41 megapixels, but you can't use more than 38 megapixels at any given time. You can shoot either 16:9 images that chop off the top and bottom or 4:3 images that chop off the sides of the full 41. This means the corners of the sensor are never used, as they are always cropped off, so the lens doesn't need to be big enough to let light into the very corners.
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It's not all that odd. Panasonic already do the same trick with some of their Lumix cameras. It makes a lot of sense as all lenses produce a circular image.
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Well there's no way they're going to fit a lens capable of giving a great picture onto a phone.
Oh, I think they could, but it'll cost ya.
I'mma think this is more like the behavior of the Olympus FE-47, where it saves a picture, which has a resolution of 14 mp, but the actual quality leaves something to be desired.
I'm looking elsewhere, from camera phones, for my next camera anyway, why do I need some kind of quality like that when I'm going to have fingerprints and dust all over the lens, anyway?
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Oh, I think they could, but it'll cost ya.
Even £1500 lenses for DSLRs aren't capable of resolving this kind of resolution across a full frame.
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Actually, they are. (Nikon thinks so, at any rate, since they just made a DSLR with that kind of resolution.)
What you should ask is "Are these lenses capable of delivering a MTF significantly different from zero at a frequency of 5000 line pairs per picture height?" (In engineering terms, this is 2500 cycles per picture height.) This is an unambiguous criterion for being able to make use of that extra resolution: can the lens deliver detail up to the Nyquist frequency of the sensor?
The answer is pretty uneq
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Thank you for taking the trouble to debunk that particular issue. I think the idea of a 'cheap' fixed focus lens vs. a 'complicated and expensive' zoom is very salient here. By using a fixed focal lens of presumably decent quality (remember, the sensor is actually fairly large for this sort of application which means you make a relatively large lens) and doing the zooming in the computer, you 1) speed things up for the user 2) make the camera physically simpler and hopefully higher image quality 3) thus m
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?
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But expect a whole host of replies agreeing that 41MP in a phone is ridiculous.
Re:Diffraction limited? (Score:5, Informative)
Summary is terrible and misses out the parts of the camera that are actually exciting. First, they never intend for people to use the 41MP setting, instead, they intend you to use 5MP and let their fancy new pixel averaging do it's thing to dramatically reduce noise levels by averaging out 8 pixels into one. That will allow higher iso settings, better low light pictures, etc. The other interesting thing is the size of the sensor, 10x7mm, which is ludicrously large for a phone, about 4 times more surface area than the latest iPhone's sensor. Heck, it's larger than the vast majority of point and shoots. Now obviously, just like megapixels, I imagine that sensor size could be artificially inflated just like any other number, but the example pictures they have posted look pretty incredible for a camera phone.
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That will allow higher iso settings, better low light pictures, etc.
That is what I want to see. I'm tired of having to turn on every light in my house and open all the blinds to get a good picture on my child doing whatever it is that she may be doing. And even then, if she is moving at all, it's going to come out blurry. Most of the time, I give up and go grab the DSLR and take the picture that way, but it certainly doesn't help when I'm on the road.
I want good, clear, low-light pictures of objects that were moving when the photo was taken. I simply don't think that is
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Exactly my thought. I've got a 10MP DSLR and even then I get the impression that the limitation is still the lens. Sure you can do averaging with lots of pixels, but then you can just use fewer, bigger pixels.
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What lens is it? Lots of the lenses that come with DSLR's are terrible. The 10MP models that come to mind are the Canon XTi (400D) and Olympus E-410/420/510/520. The lens that comes with the former is sort of a stinker, the ones that come with the latter (especially the 40-150mm) are not bad.
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I've actually got a Sigma 28-300 lens to replace the one that came with my 350D (8 MP actually). So the lens is pretty good, but when you look at the image carefully, you see that there's still a bit of blur between adjacent pixels.
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The key here is the sensor size, not the pixel count itself. There are sensors that are huge but have low pixel counts (the 12MP fullframe sensor in the Nikon D3s, for instance) that have tremendously low noise. As you say, big sensor -> more flux, regardless of how many pixels you slice it into.
Get the facts (Score:5, Informative)
I strongly recommend reading the white paper:
http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf
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Really, just please read the whitepaper.
And if that is too much, then here is an abstract.
The sensor is 41MP. Then they use a technique they are calling oversampling wherein multiple pixels are used to calculate a perfect average pixel and as far as I understand the final res of the saved image is configured. For an example, they say a 5 MP image.
Pretty cool stuff and as an engineer "Doh" moment stuff.
And yes, Mod Parent up.
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This isn't terribly new -- I do it every day when I display the 4000x3000 images from my camera on my 1920x1080 screen. My image display software does some fancy averaging to make fewer pixels out of the average values of the pixels in the original jpeg.
The only difference here is that you're doing it in software *before* you save the image to the card, rather than in software when you go to *display* the image later. But even that's not revolutionary -- most digital cameras have a mode that does pixel aver
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The "whitepaper" is marketing. "Oversampling" is just pixel averaging, and it has well known effects. You're better off having more pixel area and NOT averaging.
The sensor resolution does give them flexibility to do things like not include an optical zoom, etc. but the image quality will not be better than a sensor with fewer, bigger pixels.
They do get nice images, because they've put a big lens and a big sensor in a cell phone. But if you believe their claims that because of some marketing speak you're goi
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ARghhhh (Score:5, Funny)
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Depending on the defaults in mom's camera app and the mail app that might impose its own preferred resolution, you will get the same compressed jpegs with e.g. 5 megapixels of effective image data.
You say that as if there was a plan... (Score:5, Insightful)
This suggests either a longer life for Symbian - or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone.
Or as most of us have figured out, Nokia has been a rudderless company and this is probably the work of the "let's turn Symbian into a smart phone" faction and this is just to recover a little bit of all the money they've wasted, just like the pathetically few N-series phones they released. They probably jumped on the wrong ship when they went all in on Windows Phone, but at least that one is going somewhere. Nokia never managed to agree on one thing and then actually do it well, so Apple and Google ate them for lunch. Epic management fail, if you ask me.
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Yes, the 21 different models of n-series phones released
You do know different colors don't count as different models right? Or would you like to try listing them...
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I'll him the bother. Just go to Wikipedia, it has 27 models mentioned in the same paragraph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Nseries [wikipedia.org]
sample pictures (Score:4, Informative)
Some sample pics, apparently:
http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip [amazonaws.com]
They look OK, and amazing for a phone.
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Oh I agree it's no DSLR, but they compare well to a compact camera. Here's a pic from a Canon S90:
http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/img_0900.jpg [rollthepotato.net]
It has a range of annoying artefacts (very oversharp, too much noise reduction, very visible chromatic aberration, etc.) but it's roughly similar to the Nokia. And of course the Nokia has four times as many pixels.
Sample imeges remeased. (Score:3)
Pixel peepers... (Score:2)
Nice job Nokia. Would have been nice to see this tech a few years sooner when you still we
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Yes, the pictures look "quite nice", so what?
Do they look significantly better than what Sony, Samsung or Apple have in their top end phones? Not really, and none of those phones are nearly 2cm thick at the camera module.
It's an interesting tech demo, but that's really about it at the moment.
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This is not how you properly bash camera quality in a Nokia phone. Learn from this fellow [guardian.co.uk]: the iPhone photos are clearly better, because the little piggies are more vividly pink! And the white background is pink too! The dull picture from the Nokia just does not deliver it the way the user wants to see his porcelain piggies!
Shut up ignorant yankees (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep making fun of Nokia ignorant yankees. One of the main reasons Nokia is non-existent in US is because it tried to stand up to the telcos and protect consumer's rights by not crippling the phones as per the request of your greedy-ass cellular carriers. I guess it won't be making that mistake anymore.
The 808 just goes to show that some companies still employ engineers instead of designers. I mean, Apple has to rip off that patented technology from somewhere. ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-pays-up-licenses-patents-from-nokia/50558 [zdnet.com] )
I'm not new here, so I know it's a lot to ask, but in addition to reading the fucking article, I encourage everyone to read the white paper too: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf [nokia.com]
Also check out the sound quality of the 808 recording (listen with good headphones or speakers to really appreciate the difference) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EbLFtF50y9A [youtube.com]
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I know noone's going to read this, but you might kalpaha:
You seem to be knowledgeable about Nokia (and a bit frustrated). Im a Nokia fan myself, but lately it's very difficult to remain one and it is difficult not to blame bad management for it. Here are my reasons:
1. Can the lack of a decent camera on the E7 be explained by anything other than management failure? A business phone is sometimes used as a crude document scanner. This is not a nice to have these days, as everyone snaps pictures of offers, cont
Megapixels (Score:2)
Obliged http://xkcd.com/1014/ [xkcd.com]
41 megapixel porn... (Score:2)
now we will end up seeing way too much. TMI.
Did something similar... (Score:2)
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized. I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use. I would much rather have a better sensor since I'm still reducing the image size anyway at 6MP.
I think the big issue is that the camera manufacturers pushed higher MP but never got around to telling Joe Public what exactly MP means to them. Sort of like Intel and AMD pushing faster clock speeds, but when max clock speed reached a plateau in the 3.6-4GHz range they didn't tell consumers a 2GHz quad core with a large cache will likely kill a 3.6GHz single core with a tiny cache so many consumers still go by clock speed alone.
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:4, Insightful)
I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized. I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use. I would much rather have a better sensor since I'm still reducing the image size anyway at 6MP.
Even at 10-12MP you're fine for poster resolutions. This is the resolution current DSLRs operate at (even most full frame ones), simply because it's where you're going to get decent levels of sensitivity in the pixels and not too much noise.
More so, because the lenses, even on DSLRs can't actually resolve that resolution except in absolutely perfect conditions.
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Meh, I saw a 6 MP image from an early DSLR blown up to ten story building size once. It looked fine.
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I dunno. I"m excited to see the new Canon 5D Mark III [canonrumors.com] come out!!
I've been wanting to get a nice, high end DSLR for some time now, and have been s
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:5, Informative)
The core use here is for super-sampling with dedicated hardware that produces superior 5MP & 8MP images.
But you can also "super sample" by making fewer, larger pixels that will collect more light each. Canon stepped back to a 10MP sensor for low-light performance in their G and S9x series cameras (they've since gone back up to 12).
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RTFA, fercrissakes.
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[ahem]
Now to be fair, they do go on to add:
Translating the horrid marketing speak - they are saying that you can also use it for digital zoom. But I'll believe that when they show me an image
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However, the signal-to-noise-ratio is higher for each individual pixel. I'm not sure how the noise does scale exactly with pixel area, so I can't tell whether plain supersampling helps that much or much at all.
A while ago I read rather vage explanation that camera makers for these kinds of tiny cams do introduce certain errors in the camera optics on purpose so that they can tweak their way around the resolution barriers for sharp images. This trick naturally relies on a post-processing step. I wish I had m
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It's not just statistics, though. The sum of the light collected by the 8 is lower than the sum of light collected by the one - the surface area is smaller due to the extra circuitry and other non-light-collecting chip features.
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Of course you will get less oversampling, and finally only the actual pixels, but at least there's no digital zoom involved.
Agreed, but have you ever seen a pocket shooter (let alone a cell phone camera) that isn't lens-limited? Maybe they can make this useful with full-daylight landscape shots with lots of midtones and highlights, but there is no way that you can take a picture of like a family reunion group shot and get usable portraits by digitally zooming. And for a typical 4x6 or computer monitor or MMS, there is plenty of oversampling already even with a 4 megapixel camera.
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I don't agree, if you average the input of 8 pixels, you reduce the error that you would get by sampling from one. Pretty basic statistics.
Nope.
The "error" from sampling a pixel comes from the sensor being shitty, not your ability to read it.
The shittiness of a sensor is directly tied to its physical size / MP.
Given sensors of 5 MP and 40 MP, of the same dimension, the 40 MP sensor will be far more susceptible to noise. Each pixel receives less than 1/8th the amount of light, and you get a shittier image as a result. (It's less than because of the overhead. Draw a square, then divide it into 9 squares. The lines are the overhead you don't
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You really didn't even pay attention to the summary, let alone the article did you? The core use here is for super-sampling with dedicated hardware that produces superior 5MP & 8MP images. So... they agree with you! They have created a better sensor. It just so happens that you can also use it in non-super-sampling mode if you really really must.
Uh, what?
They're not super sampling, they're down sampling. The physical sensor is always 41 MP. They can only super sample temporally, which is retarded.
They've got a 41 MP sensor. You can run at 41 MP and get the noisiest image in the world. Or you can run at a few MP and get a that 41 MP sensor's image shrunk down, or (even dumber) you can get a crop of that 41 MP sensor (YAY DIGITAL ZOOM!). Super sampling is the process of taking more samples than required for the output. The sensor is always 41 M
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Taking a lower resolution picture just resizes the image. To super sample with a fixed sensor array like in a camera, you'd need to take multiple pictures, either building one larger image and then sizing it down (hope you have a steady hand) or taking multiple pictures over time and laying those on top of each other (hope your subject doesn't move).
The "dedicated hardware" is just some piece of shit DSP that tries to voodoo away the noise. It's gaussian blur + unsharp mask on a chip.
Mmm. I read the white paper [nokia.com].
You know, the default output size is 5MP. What do you think happens when you size a fixed size 38MP (depending on the aspect ratio) to 5MP? Why yes, I believe you will have several samples for a single pixel. And guess what the dsp does. It voodoos away the noise by shrinking the image down from those (extra) samples. (The separate chip is needed because the processing power limitations of mobile chipsets (at least at the design time. I think this is about to change)).
Zooming
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My 20Mp camera let's me crop and correct in post framing issues. I have created fantastic photos from casual experiential shots because if the larger image.
Also. at 20X30 a 20mp image looks a LOT better than a 10mp image does, IF printed on a printer that can do the resolution. the garbage printers at Costco can not.
Honestly, sell your old Canon Rebel and get a Rebel t2i and get a camera that sees in the dark and kicks the crud out of that paleolithic age camera... IF.....
If you have decent glass. Cra
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Honestly, sell your old Canon Rebel and get a Rebel t2i and get a camera that sees in the dark and kicks the crud out of that paleolithic age camera... IF.....
The Rebel t2i is very nice, have one myself. Just don't be cheap on the lens and filters. And if you install "Magic Lantern"(http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wiki), you really have a nice camera!
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Speaking of filters....
I'm looking to soon get either the Canon 5D Mk II or the new Mk III....depending on the specs/price for new and how much the price drops for the current model.
Anyway, wanting to shoot video outdoors..and be able to open the aperture up full. I've been reading about neutral density (ND) filters. I've been reading that there are some good single units that are variable, and was thinking that might be where my money is best spent (as that I
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True, the good thing about recording shooting more than you need is that you can crop though, I've been reading some such thoughts about the Nikon D800 [examiner.com] (36MP, $3000 camera) and the JVC GY-HMQ10 [jvc.com] (4K, $5000 video camera). Need an extra 2x zoom on that camera? Crop it to 9MB and you still have a very useful picture. Is what you're trying to film moving to erratic for you to stay on target? Zoom back out and crop to 1080p in post-production. Not a cheap solution but if you're can't get another take, it might be
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I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use.
Then you are going to love this phone's camera, since the default setting is 5MP, and unless you set explicitly the "tricks" mode, 8MP is the largest setting in normal mode.
I think the big issue is that the camera manufacturers pushed higher MP but never got around to telling Joe Public what exactly MP means to them.
I think all agree on this. Even Nokia. In the paper they published they say:
People will inevitably home in on the number of pixels the Nokia 808 PureView packs, but they’re missing the point. [...]
It all stems from the very early days of digital cameras, when image quality was affected by the limited number of pixels available. As the pixel numbers increased, image quality dramatically improved. However, once the resolution reached around 5Mpix-6Mpix, the real-world benefits became debatable.
But by then, the market had made a direct correlation between number of pixels and quality of image. The more pixels the better, was the received wisdom. And this thinking has stuck. Though today manufacturers would happily reduce the number of pixels in their cameras, and instead concentrate on their lenses and sensors, they’re not so sure the market would accept this.
Is nice that the company selling the device is stating this from day 1.
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:5, Informative)
Link to whitepaper: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf [nokia.com]
Re:Screw Megapixels (Score:5, Informative)
Mod up parent and reduce the rest of the comments into nothingness.
Pictures are 5MP standard.
On the short end, combining pixels help to reduce lens abberations due to pixel size.
On the long end, placement of relevant pixels in the centre reduces lens abberations.
And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
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And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
Don't they use a dedicated chip to process the images? A driver for it can probably be integrated, given some time; Elop seemed to indicate it may eventually happen. Mind you, the technology has been 5 years in development as it is.
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"digital zooming" is just in camera cropping. If your sensor is exceeding the resolving power of your lens your digital zoom is just going to be blurry pixels. You can put a nice big number on the box though.
Silly sensor resolution is silly whether you use it for fake zooming or not.
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BECAUSE MEGAPICKELS!
Typical consumers don't buy a camera based on the quality of it's optics. People could give two shits about Carl Zeiss and probably only know the name because someone on TV oooh'd and awww'd about something with a Zeiss label.
Typical consumers don't understand the circle of confusion or why a small cell-phone or compact camera sensor is going to produce inferior images to a larger sensor.
Typical consumers don't understand depth of field, fstops, the zone system, tonal quality, dynamic ra
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Because you're not going to put a telephoto lens on a smart phone.
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Reason: It makes digital zoom less of a gimmick
Imagine this: You take a shot, then do the pinch gesture to zoom in on a certain spot. You also use a single finger to get exactly what you want from the shot to appear on screen. You keep on pinching/dragging until you have the exact final image you want. You've ultimately zoomed 3x and focused on a bird flying by (or something else) and you click "save". You have an effortlessly taken image of a bird flying by, not
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but but how we will get those CSI like scenes where people zoom in a lot with perfect resolution in order to obtain the evidence, don't you want to catch the criminals?
Re:41 Megapixels (Score:4, Funny)
The captured image will occupy a small space in the upper left of the picture, the rest will be solid white but when you open the file it will still be 41 million pixels.
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41 Megapixels - wow, that will take up an entire 2008 SD card per photo.
Does it actually have a good enough lense to use all 41 Megapixels- or is this a case of the megapixels being greater than it can really accurately capture?
I know megapixel is often not a good indicator of the actual photo quality.
Not really. A moderately high end DSLR with, say, an 18MP sensor saving in RAW (18m 12-bit samples)+JPEG is around 25MB an image. Based on Nokia's numbers, *if* the sensor can save in RAW, *and* its using 12-bit, you're talking in the order of maybe 35-40MB an image, and that's probably a stretch. In JPEG, its probably under 10MB/photo.
That would've filled a cheap card you would've seen in a digital camera ten years ago, but not five years ago. Most of the SmartMedia cards I've got in a box at home from a t
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http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf [nokia.com]
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Not true. So long as you are away from the diffraction limit and your glass is good enough and you have enough light, the resolution is determined by the pixel count.
Those conditions are very hard to satisfy for very high pixel counts, and there usually are other limiting factors (noise/focusing errors/optical aberrations). But, in principle (and sometimes in practice) it's the pixel count that limits absolute resolution.