When news broke last year that Nokia had been working on a new camera technology, we were intrigued. The idea of a smartphone camera sporting a 41 megapixel sensor sounds impressive, especially since it can crop through the massive size to fake zooming. Now, it appears Nokia might be serious about a product announcement.
Smartphone cameras are getting better and better, but if what we hear is happening, the high end cameras of Android and iOS are about to have some interesting competition.
First talked about in 2012 at the Mobile World Congress, Nokia’s advance in camera technology involved taking a 41 megapixel sensor and stuffing it into a smartphone body, creating images with larger resolutions than many of the compact cameras we carry around with us from day to day.
What’s more, the idea of using a bigger sensor also lends itself to zooming, where the idea of cropping a sensor down in different places means you effectively get closer to a subject, even when there’s no optical technology. In essence, the idea of image cropping is based on digital zoom, which normally blows up the image.
With a larger sensor, however, this means you’re jumping from a 41 megapixel total image to that of a closer 5 or 8 megapixel image, and might even mean you can leave a compact at home.
Nokia’s idea for a 41 megapixel camera phone is at least a year old, and in the first generation of the smartphone, it was thrown into a Symbian smartphone, the PureView 808. Since then, Nokia has moved on, with every flagship phone sporting the Windows Phone 8 operating system.
This week, Nokia has put out a notice saying we’ll have “41 million reasons” to tune into its July 11 launch, which sounds suspiciously like a launch of a phone with a 41 megapixel sensor.
If true, Nokia would have quite an edge in the smartphone camera market, and with the launch just a couple of weeks away, we’ll know soon enough.
