Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Markets in Everything: 41 Megapixel Camera

In a smartphone.....

"At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced the 808 PureView, a smartphone with an astounding 41-megapixel image sensor. The Nokia 808 will be the first smartphone by Nokia to include its new PureView imaging technology, which combines a high-resolution sensor with Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia-developed algorithms."

17 Comments:

At 2/28/2012 11:08 PM, Blogger VangelV said...

Sounds good but if the sensor is small, and I expect that it would be, the large number just adds a lot of noise.

 
At 2/28/2012 11:26 PM, Blogger juandos said...

Well now that seems like some potentially interesting technology...

"but if the sensor is small, and I expect that it would be, the large number just adds a lot of noise"...

Maybe not vangeIV because that was one of the first thoughts I also had...

Consider the tech specs...

The specs that caught my eye (but I would like more info were these:

CAMERA

Primary 41 MP (38 MP effective, 7152 x 5368 pixels), Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash
Features 1/1.2'' sensor size, ND filter, up to 3x loseless digital zoom, geo-tagging, face detection
Video Yes, 1080p@30fps, loseless digital zoom, LED light
Secondary Yes, VGA; VGA@30fps video recording

 
At 2/29/2012 2:48 AM, Blogger Ron H. said...

juandos:

Camera: 1080p@30fps

Holy S***!

 
At 2/29/2012 3:01 AM, Blogger Ron H. said...

juandos: "Primary 41 MP (38 MP effective, 7152 x 5368 pixels)"

So much for emailing pictures to your friends.

And if you snap one that size and send it from your phone on your g4 network, under ideal conditions, it could *theoretically* finish sending in 19 minutes, if I haven't gone off the rails with my math. Please tell me I'm wrong.

On the plus side, you should be able to read license plates in Memphis from your house.

 
At 2/29/2012 3:18 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

As Ron says, you'd never need that kind of resolution. I was just using a top of the line monitor and it can only show 3.5 megapixels. Even a 4k screen can only show 8 megapixels, and that's the top of the line that's not even out yet. The only reason to use that high a resolution for taking pics is if you wanted to archive them for decades, which I doubt someone is going to do with smartphone pics, plus I also suspect that there will be noise issues.

 
At 2/29/2012 8:44 AM, Blogger Jon Murphy said...

The only reason to use that high a resolution for taking pics is if you wanted to archive them for decades, which I doubt someone is going to do with smartphone pics...

Who knows? Maybe smartphones are the new high-powered camera?

 
At 2/29/2012 9:34 AM, Blogger VangelV said...

The specs that caught my eye (but I would like more info were these:

CAMERA

Primary 41 MP (38 MP effective, 7152 x 5368 pixels), Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash
Features 1/1.2'' sensor size, ND filter, up to 3x loseless digital zoom, geo-tagging, face detection
Video Yes, 1080p@30fps, loseless digital zoom, LED light
Secondary Yes, VGA; VGA@30fps video recording


The data is misleading. Nokia collects 41 megapixels of data and uses the data to create a nice nice photo of a much smaller size that comes out to a 5-8 MP equivalent. The optics do look nice and the chip is not too small. That probably means that the phone will take decent pictures but the 41 MP claim is ridiculous.

 
At 2/29/2012 10:40 AM, Blogger juandos said...

"The data is misleading"...

Not exactly vangeIV...

Did you happen to note in the upper left hand corner (under the picture of the cell phone) of the tech spech's page there was a link that was explaining the technology?

Basically its over-sampling at work and much of it of course depends on the cleverness of the built in software...

Still and ron h and sprewell the amount of data theoretically generated per shot would be problematic for displaying properly...

 
At 2/29/2012 11:52 AM, Blogger morganovich said...

megapixels is the wrong way to measure photo quality.

my phone has more megapixels than my SLR, but it's pictures are so wildly inferior as to be unmistakable.

no one is going to take a picture with a phone that they would blow up big enough to warrant 41 mpxl.

this is just stats stuffing.

looks like a high quality effort for a phone (esp the zeiss lens) but compared to serious camera, no. not at all.

a 1.2" sensor is pretty much 35mm though, which will make a difference.

digital zoom sucks though.

 
At 2/29/2012 12:30 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"my phone has more megapixels than my SLR, but it's pictures are so wildly inferior as to be unmistakable"...

Well personally morganovich I hope you're right...

The thing about digital pics is the ability to manipulate the picture more that the outright quality of the picture...

The more pixels one has the one more can mainpulate the picture theoretically...

Yeah I too believe a quality SLR camera will take a higher quality picture, no doubt...

 
At 2/29/2012 12:49 PM, Blogger Ron H. said...

juandos: "
Still and ron h and sprewell the amount of data theoretically generated per shot would be problematic for displaying properly...
"

And for printing. Don't just click "print" unless you need a wall mural, and your paper tray is full.

 
At 2/29/2012 12:56 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of manipulating the picture, the Lytro camera that Mark linked to before is the real interesting tech, will be looking forward to seeing what comes out of that. It would be pretty cool if they could shrink that enough to put in smartphones.

 
At 2/29/2012 1:20 PM, Blogger morganovich said...

juandos-

pixels, like refresh rate, have negligible benefits after a certain point.

60 times a second is already past the human eye's ability to discern.

movies are mostly 24. moving to 120 sounds sexy, but it's meaningless.

even a large computer screen shows only 2-3 million pixels. (1920 X 1080 = 2 million)

for the difference in a photo between 4 million pixels and 41 million to even be visible you'd need to be doing prints the size of a queen sized bed.

at that point, the optics would be a bigger deal and a 35mm lens with digital zoom would look terrible.

the bigger sensor and the zeiss lens will make this a better camera than any other phone out there now, but 41 mpxl is just a marketing gimmick.

 
At 2/29/2012 2:08 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"pixels, like refresh rate, have negligible benefits after a certain point"...

Purely in a human visual mode that is correct but for data manipulation more generally is better (up to a point) according to a couple local professional videographers I know...

Local videographers seem to use both high speed film (both still and video) cameras...

When shooting landscapes with both types of cameras they then blend the results of both...

 
At 2/29/2012 3:37 PM, Blogger morganovich said...

juandos-

i hear what you are saying, but i have real doubts that manipulating 41mxpl could possibly be any better than 4-8 for and photo under poster sized.

this is especially true of pixels generated by algorithms and digital zoom like this phone would be.

i'll bet that you could not tell the output of an 8mpxl setting on this camera from a 41mplx one by anything other than file size.

 
At 2/29/2012 9:19 PM, Blogger VangelV said...

a 1.2" sensor is pretty much 35mm though, which will make a difference.

Do you really think that a camera will have a sensor that large? Let us put this in perspective.

D4 specs

See the problem? You have a $6 K camera (body only) that has a full 16MB sensor. To get the light on that sensor you need to have a lens that is of a certain width, depth and distance from the sensor. Compare that to a $700 smartphone with a good but tiny lens. As the company makes clear, you certainly would not want to take a 41MP photo with the camera unless you want a lot of noise as the effect you are looking for. The camera simply uses oversampling to produce a photo that has a 3-8 MP quality most of the time.

 
At 3/01/2012 11:11 AM, Blogger morganovich said...

v-

i was just quoting the specs juandos posted:


Primary 41 MP (38 MP effective, 7152 x 5368 pixels), Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash
Features 1/1.2'' sensor size, ND filter, up to 3x loseless digital zoom, geo-tagging, face detection
Video Yes, 1080p@30fps, loseless digital zoom, LED light
Secondary Yes, VGA; VGA@30fps video recording

according to that, it's 35mm.

no idea the optics size.

 

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