Back in March of last year, I discussed Nokia's just-introduced PureView 808 cameraphone, containing a revolutionary 41 Mpixel image sensor. The sensor's extraordinarily high pixel count was used by the handset in part to implement a high-quality digital zoom function; multiple pixels' data could also combined to generate lower-resolution images with enhanced low-light performance. However, the PureView 808 was, as it turns out, Nokia's last hurrah with respect to the Symbian operating system it ran.
Nokia has subsequently turned to Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system to power its smartphones. Although they've similarly been branded as "PureView" products, and although they also contain high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, to date their sensors have been more conventional-sized varieties. PureView has predominantly referred to the handsets' advanced computational photography capabilities (multi-image "stitching", in-image object removal, etc) deriving from Nokia's July 2012 acquisition of algorithm developer Scalado (whose technology was demonstrated by Alliance member company Texas Instruments at the 2012 Mobile World Congress show).
Cameraphone enthusiasts have been hopeful that the PureView 808's high-resolution image sensor would eventually make its way to a Windows Phone-based Nokia smartphone. If recent "leaks" are to be believed, such a product will shortly arrive. Yesterday, for example, several photographs appeared on the Flickr account of Microsoft Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore, with variable resolutions but common metadata identifying them as coming from a "Nokia Lumia 1020." And earlier today, the Windows Phone Central enthusiast website published images it claimed were of the Lumia 1020 (including a notable "41 Mpixel" label), along with the handset's supposed high-level specifications:
- It has optical image stabilization (OIS) built in
- It takes the image in a 32MP and 5MP at the same time in 16:9
- The 5MP image is over sampled dropping 7pixels into one “super pixel”
- It shoots 38MP in 4:3
- 2GB of RAM, an increase of 1GB from other high end Windows Phone 8 devices
- 32GB of internal storage, no SD
- WP8 V 8.0.10322.71
The Lumia 1020 is supposedly officially launching later this week. I'll be curious to see if the leaks are true, and if so what embedded vision developers will be able to do with the handset's hardware potential, both through the default Windows Phone API "hooks" and the proprietary additional software Nokia will bundle with the device.
