James Burland's often a provocative thinker and I enjoyed his blog post wondering if Nokia's PureView sensors might be used to record 4K video (a big step up from 1080p but already supported by YouTube, amazingly) in the future, whether on Symbian or Windows Phone. It's certainly an enticing prospect - being able to shoot 'cinema'-quality video on your phone.

One of the more memorable facts from the Nokia 808 PureView launch was the insane amount of pixels the 808 has to manage whilst capturing video. Unlike other smartphones that use a video frame that is always cropped to just the very centre of the image sensor; thereby handling only 2 million pixels per frame, the 808 uses all the data coming from the sensor, a staggering 41 million pixels per frame! Multiply that figure by 30 frames per second and you end up with well over 1 billion pixels per second.

Currently, the 808 oversamples the majority of those pixels in order to give a PureView 1080p, 720p or 540p video. The resulting video capture is stunning, the best from any smartphone yet devised, but imagine if Nokia allowed the user to capture a non (or less) oversampled video...

In essence, the Nokia 808 should be capable of capturing a 4K video, that’s 4096 x 1714 pixels at a 2.39:1 ratio. This is the kind of resolution that only high-end video cameras are capable of capturing, I’m talking about the Red One, Epic and Scarlet-X, etc, Serious kit.

At this point you are probably thinking, what’s the point of capturing all those pixels if you need a cinema projector to see them?

Read the rest of the article over on Nokia Creative.