Nokia shows off sample image from mysterious 8 megapixel phone
By Donald Melanson 
posted Feb 13th 2009 3:09PM
posted Feb 13th 2009 3:09PM
This one won't be a mystery for too much longer but, for now at least, Nokia is more than happy to tease out its latest high-end cameraphone right up until the official announcement at MWC. What we do know is that the above picture was taken with said cameraphone, and that the EXIF data revealed a couple more details in addition to its 8 megapixel nature. The most notable of those is that the phone will apparently come equipped with a Carl Zeiss lens which, judging from the sample image, certainly seems to be capable of producing some decent results. Hit up the read link to check out the full resolution version, and keep an eye on our MWC coverage for further details as we get 'em.
awesome!
nice..
WTF? No Jason mask?? Comon!
Look closer....
@N3TWORK BURN3R
i know, they almost had me. i clicked on to the large photo so i could see what it was...then it hit me!
That's some good stuff! Neat skateboard, too...
Thats how all boards look. You just never see them at that angle.
I have been skateboarding forever, and I've never seen a skateboard that looks like that. From any angle. Bizarre.
Ok, WTF is up with all the Friday the 13th shiet in all the images for every single story?
Because it's awesome!
Because it's Friday, the 13th of February?
You know, the day the Friday The 13th re-make comes out...?
Why's the read link pointing to there? It should be pointing to the original source of the story, Nokia.
No it should be poinying to where ever Engadget wants to point it. It's there blog.
It's not here blog?
Leo = Win
I don't see the mask. I also suck at the I-Spy books, so it's not to surprising...
Where is it at on the pic?
There's a poster under the security camera.
either that camera is messed up, or that skateboard is. It's wrecking my mind, man! It's not a fisheye lens, obviously. WTF is up with that board!
exactly what I was thinking broseph!
No joke, i've ridden many a sk8board and can't figure out how such a convex board would be rideable...... fisheye effect?
I coldn;t figure this out wither, but judging by the way the board is shaped and how the trucks are attached, I'd say it's actually shaped like that.
The quality is still pretty bad, they should focus on like making a 6 megapixel camphone with high-end point and shoot like picture quality, that'd be awsome
i agree. other than the size, this is the same quality my SE s710 produced (1.3mp). let's see some low-light shots nokia!
that board does look strrrange.....
Far superior than the sample shots I've seen from the Samsung Pixon/Memoir. And I mean faaaaaaaaaaar. Then again, the above shot could've had extensive post processing.
Umm, the colors are flat, which makes the skin tone look like CGI. The dynamic range sucks (face is too darkened). There will be more details in a 2 MP picture taken by a proper camera than in this.
Ok, I am not expecting it to replace a Nikon D3X, but still..
The darkened face is to be expected when you photograph somebody in front of a giant white building. Fault of the photographer, really.
It says N85 in the properties if you read the link, etc.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
well, this was unexpected. of all companies Nokia is the one I least expected to see teasers from.
Is that Sylar?
My exact thoughts LOL
looks like he found tony hawk and...
Looks like someone Shopped-out the sign (or whatever it was) which is on the wall under the security cam. Click the linked image above and see the change?
nope. read the posts above you and you will know what's going on.
Well, this looks like crap. Look at all the noise for such a low ISO setting. The extreme sharpening halos around the skater? The dynamic range is also far from impressive. Cell phones have a looooong way to go.
You all need to quit your bitching.
It's a phone first and a camera second. If you want dynamic range, sharpness, etc... use a point and shoot or a DSLR. You are expecting too much from a camera phone. The sensors will NEVER be large or powerful enough to produce excellent results.
For a camera phone, I think the image looks great. But it is a bright, sunny day so taking a decent photo won't be difficult. I expect it to fold like a cheap tent in low light situations.
It's most likely a wide angle lens but not a fisheye. The skateboard is just designed differently. If I had to take a wild guess, the shape of the board help when grinding (round in the middle and flat at the ends.)
Yes, but packing 8MP on a tiny sensor like that makes no sense because it actually DEGRADES image quality. This was shot in bright daylight, with even more light reflecting off the white building. And the shot is FILLED with noise and sharpening artifacts. 3MP would have done the same or better.
True- that tiny sensor is way over packed for its own good.
It's all hype. It's the same megapixel race going on with point and shoots. Manufacturers lead us to believe more megapixels are better. Can see the the race getting out of hand in the DSLR market in a few years. 24 megapixels on a full frame chip should be the cutoff.
Sorry but no.
I don't want to sound like a snob but the only users that claim that a 3 megapixel camera is equal (if not better) that a 5 or higher megapixel camera are users that don't own one.
@Magallanes: Sorry, but no. There are good 3MP cameras, and bad 3MP cameras, but the argument being made isn't even about the cameras.
What people are saying is very specific: that if you had two cameras with _identical_ optics, and _the same size_ and _similar tech_ sensor, the camera with the high pixel-density will have more noise, and start making bad pictures (for whatever threshold of "bad") sooner as you reduce the light level.
Now there are ways to mitigate that -- throw 2x2 median filtering and down-sampling on a 12MP raw image and it might even beat a 3MP -- but cameras doesn't do that, and almost no users do that. (I think it would be very hard to sell a "3MP camera with 12MP super-sampling sensor", even if it has demonstrably improved image quality over the 3MP sensor.)
Now if you do happen to own a 3MP and a 5MP, I'll hazard a guess that they do _not_ have the same optics, they may not have the same sensor size, and that the 5MP is either newer or a higher product line, having better sensor technology either way.
I don't own multiple digicams, but my father has gone through at least a half-dozen, and my kid brother a couple (they both like photography as a hobby much more than I), and I've seen low-light pictures Bro took with his 3MP that were better than Dad was getting with his 5MP, so the implied allegation that the theoretical performance differences don't show up in comparisons of real cameras is disproved, even if I don't actually own the cameras in question.
That is a picture taken in front of the MACBA in Barcelona. I've been there and the building is very difficult to photograph because of the whiteness. For fun, I played around with the White Balance on my Canon S3 and have some ultra-cool photos of the interior.
http://www.macba.cat/controller.php?p_action=show_page&pagina_id=24&inst_id=400
PS: The F-13 poster was added by Engadget... silly human!
"apparently come equipped with a Carl Zeiss lens"
OH RLY? Like *every other* Nokia NSeries phone since 2007...
Not very informative. A photo in a poorly-lit environment would have told us more, such as:
1) the quality of the sensor (after all, even the crappy 5800XM camera can take decent pictures, provided there's enough light)
2) whether this new handset has a xenon flash (good), or the usual dual led (awful)
And then they choose to compress the teaser shot to jpeg. Nice.
I think there are two major aspects at work here.
First, just given the way the board isn't in contact with his feet, I think the board is just vibrating after being slammed into the ground. They do that...I never realized how much until I watched that Discovery Channel show where they film stuff in super high speed. The height of that ollie is really pretty impressive, so the amount of force exerted to get that kind of air would really flex the board quite a lot.
Second, there is some obvious distortion of the image on the right side of the board. The wheel (and bolt) are a bit distorted in the vertical plane.
Additionally, a board shaped like that would be HELL to try to ollie with. The physical forces in action are: 1) typically the back foot slams the tail into the ground which causes the board to act kind of like a spring and bounce (I say typically because you could nollie and use the front foot) 2) the front foot slides toward the front of the board. This is done for two primary reasons -- a: to help rotate the board so it will level out and b: to slide against the grip tape and elevate the board even higher (you can actually even ollie without the board bouncing off the pavement if you time it right...all of the lift comes from this step).
photo taken here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=barcelona&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.861942,56.601563&ie=UTF8&ll=41.383088,2.167557&spn=0.004033,0.006909&z=17&iwloc=addr&layer=c&cbll=41.383001,2.167598&panoid=o1dloTbIEKxiwN7DK-QLtw&cbp=12,288.98901243201067,,0,-0.5134683210724885
If it has a qwerty keypad, bluetooth, wifi, 3g, and plenty of storage, im sold
OMG engadget killed the server..... I cant see the pic.
As is this:
http://www.gtfo.com
So guys, if you think this photo isn't good at all, why don't you take your camera phone, and take a shot for a fast moving object like this man jump with skateboard, and see what happen in the photo?
It may be better than every other cameraphone on the market, but it's still crap quality - as others have said, if they used the same level of technology to make a 2MP sensor, the quality would be significantly better. (You can gain most but not all of that improvement by resizing the image down, which does make it look pretty acceptable. It will probably still suck in low light.)
Or in other words: yes nice phone camera, but 8MP is still a bullshit number (and to be fair, everyone knew that already).
Unfortunately because there is no other way of reporting picture 'quality' to consumers, this is going to continue ad infinitum. (Maybe somebody could come out with a way of calculating a number that measures actual image quality, or at least key aspects of it? That'd be extremely difficult to do, though - and then you'd have to try convincing companies to use it when they already have a nice convenient number that they can increase every year.)
It's so preety!