The mediocrity of cellphone pictures hasn’t stopped us from hitting our phone’s shutter button, of course. Every year, we take billions of photos with our phones, often choosing them over powerful cameras to record even important life events. The cellphone’s handiness seems to excuse a long list of photographic disappointments: feeble sensors, no zoom, no real flash, no ability to freeze action and heartbreaking low-light graininess.
Well, good news: Little by little, the world’s electronics companies are finally turning their attention to this problem. Some of them try to graft cellphones onto cameras; others try to jam real cameras onto cellphones.
Nokia has taken the latter approach with its new Lumia 1020 cellphone ($300 with a two-year ATT contract, $660 without). It’s a huge Windows Phone 8 phone with an absolutely amazing camera.
Now, Nokia says that this phone has a 41-megapixel camera. But if you think megapixels equal picture quality, you’ll be sorely disappointed, both in this camera and any other.
The megapixel count really means very little. There have been 2-megapixel cameras that took wonderful photos, and 20-megapixel cameras that took terrible ones. A high megapixel count is primarily a marketing gimmick.
And in any case, any picture you send wirelessly from this phone — by e-mail, text message, Facebook, Twitter or whatever — is actually a five-megapixel shot. Which, again, doesn’t mean anything good or bad; five is plenty even for a big printout. (The only way to get the full-resolution originals off the phone is to connect the phone to a Mac or PC with a USB cable.)
The high megapixel count is useful in exactly one situation: when you want to crop out much of the scene. If you’re starting with 41 megapixels, you can throw away a lot of a photo and still have enough resolution for a big print. The phone’s Pro Cam app is made for just that: it lets you create photos from a piece of a larger scene.
In total, the 41-megapixel business is a lot of hot air. What Nokia should really be bubbling about instead is the superiority of this camera’s sensor — its digital film. Compared with the sensors in most phones, this one is huge and especially light sensitive.
You’ve never seen, or even contemplated, photos this good from a phone. They really are spectacular. (See for yourself in the slide show that accompanies this column online.)
Most of the time, the photos are just as good as what you’d get from a $300 pocket camera (you know, the kind that doesn’t also make phone calls). Often, they’re better. The low-light shots seem like they came from some kind of “Mission: Impossible” spy gear. And if the subject is close to the lens, the background melts into a delicious blurriness, just as in professional portraits.
Sometimes, though, the photos are worse. Shutter lag (a delay after you press the shutter button) is a problem. There can be distortion at the outer edges of the frame. Some photos are a little “soft.”
Furthermore, even this cameraphone doesn’t have a true zoom; a three-inch telescoping lens would probably be uncomfortable in your palm when you’re on a call. Instead, it has a 3X digital zoom: slide your finger up the screen to magnify the scene. You’re not really zooming at all, of course — just cropping into a smaller area — but it works well enough.
On most cameras, what you get by way of a flash is really just an LED lamp that momentarily lights up for short-range illumination. On this one, you get an actual flash — a mini strobe that works much better. Like most Windows Phone devices, this one has a physical shutter button on the edge, too, so it feels like you’re holding a real camera. (For $80, you can buy a “camera grip” that adds an extra battery, a more convenient handle and a tripod socket.)
The 1020 also has a superb image stabilizer that comes in handy for videos. This phone’s videos really are something: stable, bright, 1080p high definition with crisp stereo sound.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 14, 2013
An earlier version of this article misidentified an app for the Lumia 1020 phone that allows the creation of photos from a piece of a larger scene. It is Pro Cam, not Smart Cam. The article also included one app incorrectly in a listing of those missing from the phone. There is indeed a Dropbox app.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/technology/personaltech/lumia-1020-a-great-camera-grafted-to-an-oddball-phone.html?partner=rss&emc=rss