This is the third and last part of our Marathon review of 808 PureView. You can catch first two parts of the review by clicking on following links.
Review Part 1: 808 PureView Review Part 1. UI and OS Impressions, Performance, Design, Display, Connectivity options.
Review Part 2: 808 PureView Review Part 2. Social, Browser, Music & Video Player, Gallery , DLNA play, Battery Life, Nokia Music.
So what we will cover in this article is the Camera, and Rich recording impressions. First of all coming to camera, other than sensational 41 MP sensor, what catches the attention quickly is the new awesome “Camera UI”.
Camera UI:
The camera UI is one of the best you will ever see on any Smartphone. The most striking thing about this camera UI is the way you can handle capturing image and quickly go through various options. There are three image/video capturing modes.
- The first one is Automatic which is the default mode. In this mode you can just “point and shoot” and get PureView noise free 5 MP images. But there is option of putting Flash on/off/red-eye.
- This is mode is obviously for those users who don’t want to play with camera settings and want an easy preset point and shoot settings. 808 PureView doesn’t disappoint those users and the 5 MP images that you can capture with this mode is the best ever on any smartphone.
- The third and final mode is Creative mode which gives you full freedom to play with all the Camera settings.
Check the below screenshot for a peep into the flexibility that Creative mode offers.
Apart from all the above, you can press and hold on the screen in any mode and you can see the context sensitive menu popping up where you can select from options like Automatic, Close up, Hyperfocal etc.
Lossless zoom and PureView Image quality:
PureView technology brings goodness of “Pixel binning” to the 41 MP monster sensor, thereby reducing the noise to virtually zero levels. Due to this the images captured in 5 MP or 8 Mp are the one of the best you might have seen from even advanced compact camera or even entry-level DSLRs.
The other side of this pixel oversampling is the goodness of Lossless zoom that simply is as good as true optical zoom. You can zoom up to 4X in image capture without losing on image quality. In case of video capturing zoom levels are as crazy as 12X for 360p video capture.
Here we would like to bring few 100 % crops of images captured in 5 MP Automatic mode and 8 MP Creative PureView mode with color tone set as automatic. One set of crops is at full zoom level offered at 5 MP and 8 MP resolutions. 8 MP crop is on the Top and 5 MP crop at the bottom.
Without zoom :
With full zoom:
- After having a look at above crops, it hits you what Nokia has achieved with 41 MP sensor and pixel oversampling. The crops at full zoom level are so much sharp and noise free.
- One thing to be noted is that the color reproduction remains same througout the 5 MP Automatic and 8 MP Creative modesand it is very natural yet looks vibrant.
Now have a look at some of the videos showing lossless zoom at work,
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL1KedbJ4ds&feature=player_detailpage]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=36fRPEgUiTc]
Unique features, Comparison and Shootout with N8:
It is always good to bring in a benchmark. In this case there was only one camera smartphone, which went unchallenged for last two years. Yes we are talking about N8 here. So here are some of our impressions of the 808 PureView VS N8 comparison.
- 808 PureView has got a few very nice tricks up its sleeve. One of them is “capture from locked position” which obviously was absent on N8 natively.
- 808 PureView has both Xenon and LED flashes giving it upper hand in video capturing.
- The camera application on 808 PureView opens significantly faster than N8. Also image capturing on 808 PureView is deemed to be the fastest on any of the smartphones by many reviewers. We too found it very quick and it blows away N8 in sheer speed.
- It is very convenient to directly go to to image in the Camera app itself, just after capturing and your camera becomes ready for next image capture. Obviously we missed this on our N8 where you have to go to gallery to be able to zoom in and play with the capture image.
- One mentionworthy feature is the native “Burst Mode” like capability where ou can press and hold the camera shutter key and click images in quick succession. This is very handy in case you are capturing a moving object.
We have done extensive imaging shootout of 808 PureView with N8 and 808 PureView emerges as the winner with significant margin over N8. You can read about these shootouts in our earlier articles.
http://nokiapoweruser.com/2012/08/05/808-pureview-vs-n8-imaging-shootout-part-1/
Low light video comparison with N8:
Low light video capture is a challenging task for any camera and it puts Sensor quality, CAF, Noise control to the ultimate test. Here we have not used “LED” flash on 808 PureView. 808 PureView’s video capture is in 8 MP creative mode while N8’s video capture is in 9 MP mode. Both videos are 720p to make the comparison fair :). Check the videos,
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BlnDQ7rvqYs]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mwt5tbF7EcE]
Our observations,
Rich recording:
One of the amazing features that 808 PureView comes with is the unique CD quality “Nokia Rich -recording” which is the first for any smartphone. Trust us, this is so good, “it is hard to trust that such amazing audio recording result is possible without any external Mic”.
Check one of our videos captured with 808 PureView for feeling the quality of Rich-recording.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5HdnJfv_hPI]
Very soon we will be compiling the full review and would present it to you.
