Nokia shows off sample image from mysterious 8 megapixel phone
By Donald Melanson 
posted February 13th 2009 3:09PM
posted February 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.
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!