Entitled 'The Promise Of Lumia: You Won’t Believe These Photos Were Taken On A Phone', Nokia old-hand Vaibhav Sharma shows off some of the night time low light landscapes he took on the Lumia 928 over the last month. Helpfully, he provides the full resolution images, so that you can download and explore for yourself. As I've written before and demonstrated, the OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) on the Nokia Lumia flagships is very effective indeed, all other factors being equal, and the Lumia 928 excels itself in this sort of test.

Vaibhav writes:

I spent over a month with a Lumia 928 recently and I’m glad that I was carrying one while touring the Unites States. While I did take my trusty Canon 550D along, after seeing what the Lumia 928 was capable of, I didn’t bother lugging it around and it stayed at the hotel. The Lumia 928 packs the same camera module as the Lumia 920, but with a Xenon flash. The Lumia 925 on the other hand features a slightly different lens, and comes with next generation camera algorithms that are supposed to make these cameras even better. While the Lumia 928 didn’t enjoy those benefits (the Amber update isn’t available yet), it more than held its own. In fact, you won’t believe these photos were taken on a cameraphone if I didn’t tell you.

All of the following photos are taken in extremely low light, and have been shot completely handheld. Yet, the level of detail and the lack of noise in these photos is really remarkable. These are the tips and tricks I used while taking these photos.

On July 11 Nokia is expected to announce the Lumia 1020, a 41MP Windows Phone. We don’t know if it will feature optical image stabilisation in addition to the 41MP sensor, but if the Lumia 928 can produce results like these without pixel binning, I cannot wait to see what that monster will be capable of.

Indeed, the combination of the PureView phase 1 (oversampling from a huge sensor) and PureView phase 2 (3-axis OIS) technologies in one device is mouth-watering to any fan of phone cameras.

The Nokia 808 (PV phase 1) is still (at least as at July 10th, 2013) the best all round (highest quality, most flexible) camera phone in the world, with the likes of the Lumia 928 and 920 some way back (e.g. see here), but the latter models do come into their own for these type of night shots and it's absolutely fair to say that the PureView phase 2 (OIS) tech is fairly mature now, with stunning results also for video capture. What's needed is to combine the 3-axis OIS with the original Nokia 808 camera (or at least a variant of it) and you'll have something rather special*.

Vaibhav's photos are impressive, eh? Grab them at full resolution and see what you think.

* not forgetting a full strength Xenon flash, something which the Lumia 928 lacked.