Nokia to bring back 41MP camera: how does it work?

The rumour mill is grinding away with new leaked photos of a Nokia Lumia smartphone with its 41-megapixel image sensor technology. Is this the smartphone camera you’ve been waiting for?

This won’t be the first time Nokia has utilised this pixel-packing camera technology; the Finnish firm launched the same tech in the limited release of the PureView 808 smartphone early last year, but it will be the first time it has made its way to a Windows Phone device.

This is a big deal for both Nokia and Microsoft, as it will give Windows Phone a unique feature that none of its rivals can claim at this time. Pairing the enormous image sensor with the camera smarts of Windows Phone 8 should result in some great, easy-to-take photos, as photography is one key area where Windows Phone excels.

Why so many pixels?

If you follow digital photography blogs, you’ve probably heard of the megapixel myth. For years, photo gurus have warned us off buying a camera just because it has more megapixels than another. Just because a photo is compromised of 10-million pixels rather than 5-million pixels doesn’t mean that it is a better photo, just that it is a bigger photo.

So Nokia’s 41-megapixel image sensor isn’t remarkable based on this number alone, but in how Nokia makes use of all of those tiny little specks of colour.

When you take a picture with the Nokia PureView, the sensor gathers the information by combining 7 pixels into one so-called super pixel. This is called ‘pixel oversampling’ and the result is smoother-looking pictures with far less noise than those taken with cameras shooting to a sensor with fewer, larger pixels.

There is also the added benefit that when you choose to zoom in with this camera, you get much clearer close-ups. Digital zoom cameras work by cropping the image to what is seen on only one portion of the image sensor. When you do this with the PureView camera, you are cropping to a much higher number of pixels than you would with a competitors camera.

If you want to see this in action, see if you can spot the name of the guy hanging from the rock on his shoe in this zoomable gallery of PureView photos.

So when it comes to taking photos, the PureView technology is a win-win. The only downside is that the enormous sensor needs space in your phone, so you can’t have a 41MP camera without the handset having a serious bump on the back. But if photography is a key smartphone spec for you, then you probably won’t mind the shape it makes in you jeans pocket.