Is it a smartphone with a camera or a camera with a phone? - 41-megapixel camera?

[clemmb]

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...ntcmp=features

[ham]

Shame they've crippled it with Symbian.

[clemmb]

Shame they've crippled it with Symbian.

Ya, the article states that it will probably not hit the US because of this.

[Daniel Browning]

I would love to see a comparison of this camera phone with one of the new $5,000 16 MP DSLR cameras with a top-flight lens. I bet that under certain conditions, the 41 MP camera phone would have significantly better resolution and a reasonable noise level.

[ahab1372]

I am sure I will not even want anything close to 40MP for my smartphone snapshots. What will this be good for? To allow cropping? I wonder if the lens going to keep up with this.

Arnt

[Daniel Browning]

What will this be good for? To allow cropping?

It looks like cropping (superior "digital zoom") is the primary benefit that they are marketing. I see laypeople trying to get a shot with their camera phone from far away all the time. This would actually let them do it in some circumstances -- you can't just make the lens zoom, because then the phone would have to become larger (and most people would rather have a thin phone with no zoom than a thick phone). This way they can have their cake (thin phone) and eat it too (zoom).

[andnowimbroke]

I can barely edit my photos now using half the megapixels of that beast.

[neuroanatomist]

I can barely edit my photos now using half the megapixels of that beast.

The default generates 5 MP images, which they bill as combining pixels to reduce noise. There's also a comment about taking a 41 MP image, but then deciding which part is most interesting and saving that crop. I'm not sure that you can actually save a 41 MP image at full res.

[ChadS]

It doesn't say in the article how large a sensor this is. If you ask me all it's going to do with 41 MP is oversample the blur one gets with the typically crappy plastic, molded lenses in cell phone cameras. Yes, Nokia's cameras are on the better end but nowhere close to what would be necessary to get full use out of this.

Short focal length plastic lens so everything is "in focus" then "digitally zoom" the area of interest. Certainly not in DSLR performance range.

[neuroanatomist]

Sensor is 1/1.2", so it's a 1.4µm pixel size similar to many mobile phones (but still smaller pixels than even the smallest P&S cameras with 1.6µm pixels). Having said that, the sensor itself is quite large, relatively speaking - it's bigger than the S100, bigger than Fuji's X-10, and getting close to the Nikon CX size.