From Nokia Conversations:
Instead of deep diving into menus, Nokia Pro Camera uses sliders and clear visual indicators on the display of the Lumia 1020 to let you control the camera settings.
Using Nokia Pro Camera you can control settings such as:
- Shutter speed (1/16000 to 4 seconds)
- EV value
- ISO (100 to 4,000)
- White balance
- Manual focus
“Mobile photographers have never been able to fully control parameters like shutter speed, so if you wanted to take a long exposure shot of a night scene, you had to use a DSLR-camera or similar,” says Marcus.
“However, such cameras don’t have the usability of a big touchscreen with multi-touch, and the ability to do gestures like swipe & two-finger-rotate. You have to use scroll wheels and buttons to navigate long menus, and really know what you’re doing. Now with Pro Camera you get a great user interface and creative control!”
Another neat illustration of how Nokia is pioneering and simplifying touch-enabled and graphical camera interfaces is the slide zoom feature.
Normally, with pinch to zoom you need two hands to operate it, one to hold the smartphone and another to pinch on the display. With Pro Camera, you can hold the Lumia 1020 and slide to zoom with one hand, letting you focus on getting closer to the action.
Nokia Pro Camera will be available for Nokia Lumia 1020 at launch and it will also be coming to all Nokia Lumia PureView smartphones (Lumia 920, 925 and 928), but will require an upgrade to the latest Amber software.
Good to hear, even if it will somewhat annoy the developers of the many third party Windows Phone camera applications (e.g. Clever Camera)!
Elsewhere online, WP Central and others are reporting that this same Pro Camera upgrade will effectively add stereo audio in video capture, something which has been missing due to limitations in the Windows Phone platform up until now:
Although many of are blown away by Nokia’s HAAC (high amplitude audio capture) microphones, which allow their Lumia line to record distortion-free audio (think of a rock concert), there was always one drawback that you may not have known about: mono. Yup, despite having three microphones on board, the device only processed in mono sound, meaning even though it was distortion free it was still a step behind.
We can now confirm that the Nokia Lumia 1020 fixes this by featuring full-stereo HAAC recording ability. What’s more? It’s part of the Pro Camera suite that other Lumia devices are expected to get, meaning your Lumia 92x can get stereo-recording in the near future.
To which most Lumia 920 (etc) owners will say 'About bl***y time', of course. Video capture from the OIS camera in the 92x generation is so smooth and impressive, having mono audio was really letting the devices down.
Anecdotal evidence around the web suggests that GDR2 and Nokia Amber will start to be rolled out before the end of July. Not long to wait!