Hands On With the 41-Megapixel Nokia PureView 808
BARCELONA–Forty one megapixels. That’s what it says on the back of the Nokia PureView 808, a new smartphone that can safely be called the highest resolution cameraphone ever. I got some time with it this morning and it’s impressive, but perplexing.
The 808 is a solid block of white plastic. It isn’t slim, but c’mon guys, it’s 41 megapixels. More importantly, it feels like a premium device, without loose or creaky bits. There’s an HDMI port on top, a dedicated camera button, and of course that camera on the back: a relatively large lens with a big Xenon flash above it. The phone has a 4-inch, 640-by-360 touch screen–that’s a standard Symbian resolution–as well as a 1.3GHz processor and 16GB of memory, plus a memory card slot.
Pressing the camera button takes a picture within less than a second. So what can you do with 38 megapixels? You can zoom and crop. I took a shot of the Nokia booth and then zoomed in on a tiny little element, cropping it into what appeared to be a tidy image of 5 megapixels or so.
That’s the equivalent of a 3x lossless zoom at 5 megapixels, Nokia said. The camera has an f/2.4 aperture, which isn’t as bright as HTC’s new One X at f/2.0, but is still good for a cameraphone.
You can digital-zoom within videos without losing resolution, too, capturing 1080p video at up to 4x zoom and 720p at 6x zoom. Audio recording is “CD quality,” according to Nokia.
