Calling it the “next chapter in smartphone photography”, Nokia on Thursday night launched the Lumia 1020 phone, complete with a 41-megapixel camera.
“We’ve made the back the new front,” CEO Stephen Elop told the packed Zoom Reinvented launch event in New York, where the 1020’s impressive camera features were unveiled.
The new Lumia uses a clever software technique to oversample images, producing “blur-free, super-high-detail photos day or night”, Elop said, using part of the demonstration to compare photos taken using rival devices from Samsung and Apple. The 1020’s camera, unsurprisingly, produced far superior results.
Elop showed off zooming in from a helicopter over New York and from a boat in Helsinki harbour, which produced spectacular close-ups. “You can literally find a needle in a haystack,” he said as he demonstrated zooming in to find the needle in a pile of straw.
Every time a user takes a picture with the 1020, it captures two images: one at full resolution, and the other a 5-megapixel oversampled image for sharing on e-mail or social networks. The phone crams, or oversamples, extra information, making the smaller, and shareable image significantly better. “We are processing up to 38m pixels at one time, up to five times more than the competition,” Elop said.
Another important feature is that the 1020 can zoom out from tightly cropped shots to show the rest of image. It can also zoom into video, demonstrated on stage by Nokia’s Kristina Björknäs who used the phone to shoot video of bees moving about in a hive. When the camera zooms out, you can see the imagery is being shot from several metres away.
A snap-on camera grip is a clever add-on cover that has an ergonomic grip, extra control buttons, an additional battery and a tripod mount. This is a smart accessory that focuses on the key camera functionality, which Nokia is betting is going to appeal to consumers who increasingly choose cameras as their main feature of a new smartphone.
Third-party applications have been designed specifically for the 1020 from CNN, Vyclibe, Yelp, Foursquare, Path and Flipboard. There’s also the David Hockney-inspired app called Panagraph, as well as Snapcam, Hipstamatic and Oggl Pro.
The Lumia 1020 goes on sale in the US, on AT&T’s network, on 26 July for US$300 on a contract, and will roll out to the rest of the world after that, Elop said. There’s no immediate word on when it will be launched in South Africa.
- Toby Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine. Follow him on Twitter