For the uninitiated, the PureView technology is a pixel oversampling technique that reduces an image taken at full resolution into a lower resolution picture, thus achieving higher definition and light sensitivity, and enables lossless zoom. We saw this first on Nokia 808, but has been improved further on Lumia 1020. The camera on 1020 couples the 41MP 2/3-inch BSI sensor with Optical Image Stabilization and a high resolution f/2.2 all-aspherical 1-group Carl Zeiss lens. Nokia has bundled a new camera application with Lumia 1020. The Pro cam app allows a greater degree of control over the camera settings than the standard Windows Phone camera app, providing settings to manually control exposure level, white balance, shutter speed and film ISO ‘on-the-fly’. This should greatly appeal a lot of prosumers or keen photographers, but what about the normal consumers who don’t like to meddle around the settings? Well, the auto mode works just fine. In fact, most of the photo samples we have posted below are taken in auto-mode.
The power of Zoom
Nokia Lumia 1020 takes pride in letting you shoot in super high resolution, which means you can zoom in close to your shot after you’ve taken it. Then rotate, reframe, crop and share new images as many times as you want. Today, we are sharing some of the images we could take from a Lumia 1020 which exemplifies this aspect. All the images below are unedited and straight from the phone, except for the cropping and stitching. You can click each of them to get a higher resolution image (which is still not the full 34MP) hosted on Flickr. On the hindsight, I feel I could have zoomed in a bit more, but the edges would start getting blurry. The bee wasn’t completely stagnant, hence it was a bit tough for us to get the focus right. Check the depth of field (DOF) effect. In comparison to the previous pic, the sharpness is much better. That is because this fly wasn’t moving at all. Love the color reproduction in this image. This was extremely challenging as squirrels are highly energetic and can’t stay in one place. This lad was aware of my presence, but the spilled groundnuts were too tasty to run away. Those shadows make the squirrel almost invisible without zooming in. Clarity and details. That’s what a 41-megapixel camera can do for you. This little bugger was running for his life. The light was pretty good, hence we didn’t have much of a problem with the sharpness. Yellow Lumia 1020!
Absolutely love the color reproduction in this picture! In case you haven’t checked out our video comparison of Lumia 1020 with three other smartphones, do take a look.
Thanks to @arvindbhatta for helping me with the photo-shoot.
