From the article:
The story of how Nokia’s leading imaging experts, Eero Salmelin and Juha Alakarhu, sketched the concept for a 41-megapixel camera phone on a paper napkin in a Tokyo bar over a few beers in 2007 has passed into modern legend.It was their graceful solution to the problems faced with optical zoom and how it could work in a package that fits properly in your pocket. As Eero says, “It’s not difficult to do optical zoom, but how do you make optical zoom that’s good in a phone? This was the challenge we wanted to solve.”
It would be another five years before the Nokia 808 PureView and its revolutionary 41-megapixel sensor was unveiled to the world at Mobile World Congress in 2012. They proved that you didn’t need optical zoom to capture amazing detail.
The team had a sneaking suspicion that they had created something special, but even they couldn’t have anticipated just how excited people were about it. They had created a genuine game-changer.
“Whenever you are making a new device, you feel nervous before it lands. I can understand how an artist would feel when they spend months and years on a piece of work, and then it’s exciting to hear what other people think about it,” says Juha.
“You are anxious about people’s reactions and it was wonderful with the Nokia 808 PureView that they loved it.”
High Resolution + OIS
The 808 PureView is the obvious place to start when you’re looking for the building blocks that would lead to the Nokia Lumia 1020.
However, another important milestone is the optical image stabilisation (OIS) innovation that first appeared on the Nokia Lumia 920. “We had the idea of combining OIS and the high resolution sensor pretty soon after we started working on the camera module for the Lumia 920. It made sense to combine them,” says Eero.
With Nokia building new experiences on Windows Phone and the mouth-watering prospect of introducing a smartphone camera with both OIS and high resolution capabilities, all the ingredients were in place for the Nokia Lumia 1020…
If only it was that easy!
Developing the Lumia 1020 remained a huge technical challenge, even if the team had the experience from developing previous devices.
“We had an opportunity to re-design and improve the camera module used in Nokia 808 Pureview. The camera module on the Lumia 1020 is much more advanced. The image sensor and OIS are the new generation, and there are more advanced optics, ” says Juha.
“There are a lot of improvements with the algorithms too. For example, the first thing that people might notice when they take photos with the Lumia 1020 is how beautiful and much more vivid the colours are. The oversampling algorithms are much better.”
Furthermore, not a single component from the 808 PureView’s camera module is used in the Lumia 1020’s.
Worth a quick read over your morning coffee. Many people have asked me which of the two PureView devices I think will come out on top in a real world shoot-out - it'll be very close, I can promise that, at least. The 808 has a larger sensor and more powerful flash, but the 1020 has the later BSI sensor and OIS. The 808 has explicit control of resolution and snaps quickly, while the 1020 'dual captures' and takes much longer to do it, but allows for post-capture flexibility.
In the end, I wouldn't like to live or die on the difference and suspect it will probably come down to user experience, i.e. in which camera interface people prefer and how much use they make of the newer software features.
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