28 April 2010

New Camera Phones Getting
Ready To Revolutionize Photography

Few months back I made my feelings about 12 megapixel camera modules for mobile device abundantly clear, and as I said then, we should not treat these tiny little 12 MPX sensor chips for mobile devices as the revolutionary change in chip technology nor should we take mega pixels as a measure of camera performance as many hail them to be.

Generally speaking, the mobile technology progress gives consumers what they expect and the main problem is that leading manufacturers know it will be hard to sell a five or six megapixel camera when their competitor's shiny and tinny phone is equipped with 8, 10 or even 12 MP for not much more money!

Average mobile phone users don't know much about the accuracy and quickness of the camera's autofocus, neither about lens quality or sensor sensitivity, but I guess that most of you will agree with me that most of them can do basic megapixel arithmetic real well and that’s the main problem and main reason why phone makers continue to squeeze ever more megapixels into their mobile devices!

Typical consumer believes that more is better but it is nothing than the big fat lie. First of all by increasing the pixel amount while the sensor size remains pretty much the same makes the pixels on mobilephones sensors smaller and less sensitivity which increase photo noise and leads to bad performance in dim conditions, and the loss of finer tonal gradations.

To be honest with you I am not expecting an end to the megapixel race after tpublishing this article, megapixels will always be important, but here on Symbian Freak we’ll continue with educating and repeating that high quality lenses, image stabilization technologies and additional features such as face detection are at least as important as pixel counts when we are talking about image quality!

Anyway, Anyway, what makes N8 stand out of the crowd is its a substantially larger sensor than any ever used in any other Nokia device that emphasizes sensitivity over megapixels and rivals those found in compact digital cameras!!

The Nokia N8 also introduces the ability to record high definition videos and edit them with a smart built-in editing suite on the device. Playback quality is just as important, and the 3.5-inch HD capacitive touchscreen is the ideal window for assessing your flicks and footage. There’s also a HDMI connector allowing you to hook the smartphone to your HD TV and share your media with friends and family in superb quality.

The Nokia N8 is a global project, as Dinning confirms, combining the passions of so many Nokia folk from around the world. For some time now, the team behind the N8’s camera has been working tirelessly, testing, tuning and optimising individual aspects of the camera’s performance. It’s getting so detailed now, Dinning tells us, that at times they’re struggling to see the difference in output from one test to another. But, as a self-certified perfectionist, Dinning wants to take it even further. But first, a look at how far it’s already come.

The team behind the Nokia N8’s camera want to set new benchmarks. Not just for the quality of the still image camera, but the video recording as well. Across both uses, the team have been optimising each specific element of the device’s camera for as many use cases as possible. Cracking Improving the low light performance nut is one of the hardest challenges for mobile device cameras. Naturally, that’s where the camera team started. This time though, the effort was focussed not just on still images, but on video too.

In dramatically improving low light performance, the team were able to improve performance in bright conditions as well. Damian takes up the story “Early on we were seeing some images which on the display, looked staggeringly sharp, but there was a digital look to them. I suggested Many mobile phones take really good pictures these days but we wanted to create something which went beyond that. I wanted to see if we could create something which looked much more natural then before. we go down the road of creating something that’s really natural in its appearance.”

Unlike some competitors, the Nokia N8 doesn’t produce over-sharpened or “digital looking” images. Instead the results the team have created look natural and display as well on the N8’s bright screen as they do over the built-in HDMI on a hi-def TV.

The combination of industry leading Carl Zeiss wide-angle optics and the biggest sensor in a mobile device means the Nokia N8 sports a much better balance than in previous devices. The images it produces (both still and moving) sport a surprisingly high degree of detail, but without any much of the noise you see in images from some other devices.

With better optics and a bigger sensor comes a reduction in the need for image processing. However, the team decided to make the most of that situation and focussed on utilising the freed-up bandwidth to improve other aspects of the imaging functionality. Red eye reduction was first seen as a software update in the N86 8MP and in the Nokia N8 it sees a big improvement. Face detection is also faster and much more efficient than previous incarnations. The biggest leap though, comes in auto focus. It’s still being tested and tweaked, but the team are already seeing speed improvements over previous devices, with a reduction of about 50 per cent, reducing auto focus on a typical still image to about around half a second or less.

The latency in the shutter release also sees a speed improvement and is now running at about 150 milliseconds. That’s as fast as many dedicated cameras and actually faster than some, according to Dinning. What’s more, even though image sizes are bigger, given the size of the sensor, the time between taking pictures has also seen an big improvement in speed.

The Nokia N8 sports a Xenon flash which is some 30 per cent smaller than previously seen on a Nokia device, yet sports roughly the same power as we’ve had on previous incarnations. Combined with the optics and image sensor, it also performs brilliantly in low light conditions, ensuring quality shots virtually no matter where you are, or what you’re doing.

The Nokia N8 is without doubt a great imaging device. The technology that powers it has been chosen with care, tuned with the utmost attention and the results, we’re sure you’ll agree, are simply staggering.