The Megapixel War

At a time when screen sizes are defying human hands and redefining the term “large screen” , Nokia is all set to wage the Megapixel war in hope to claim the market share that they previously owned.

The 41 Mega Pixel laden Nokia Lumia 1020 is all set to release today. According to the recent leaks by Vizileaks the 1020 will sport the PureView technology that we first saw in the  Nokia PureView 808 released earlier.

So what do you get out of a 41 Megapixel camera ? 

Well, aside from a huge bulge on the back of the phone , it does pack one of the most powerful sensors and lens made for a smart phone or even a digital camera. One important thing is that you usually wouldn’t take a picture at 38/34 Megapixel as it would result to a very huge image size and you would probably run out of storage space in some time.

What the engineers back at Nokia have successfully achieved is a concept of oversampling. Higher Megapixels lead to storage problems. So the one way to solve this was to essentially keep the clarity and color information of the image intact and compress the pixels in order to get a decent 5 megapixel image. This way you would get brilliant images even at low light conditions.

One other thing is the Zoom feature. In order to get a decent 3x zoom one would have to sacrifice on the clarity of an image on any smart phone. The only way to get great zoom and still maintain the clarity was to attach one of those motorized lenses which would naturally bulk it up further. So the Engineers at Nokia decided to go for loss less optical zoom. With this feature one can zoom in and not worry of any loss in the picture clarity.

These days when digital cameras have taken a hit and almost every one is out there creating great content with their smart phone cameras , Lumia 1020 will will definitely add to the quality. But when it comes to viewing on smaller screens , will it really matter remains to be answered. The added bulge on the back and the weight of the device also comes into play for daily/power users.