As referred too often (e.g. here), Windows Phone, as its built-in Photos handling stands today, does not display every pixel of full resolution (e.g. 8MP) JPG photos captured on the phone. Thankfully, word comes to us from none other than Windows Phone supremo Joe Belfiore that his team at Microsoft have finally fixed this limitation for the OS build that's coming on the Lumia 1020 next week. Although this code improvement might be limited to just the Lumia 1020, it is also possible that it will also make it into official firmware for other 9-series devices, if not in the imminent GDR2 update, then shortly after.

The quote was from Joe in this interview, chatting with Nokia's Kevin 'Awesome' Shields:

What are some specific examples of how this collaboration worked and how the Windows Phone OS helped?

Joe: We know the OS deeply and add that kind of thinking to the mix. So we spent time together working on the architecture so the 1020 camera can capture two images at once—a super high-res shot and an oversampled 5-megapixel version for easier sharing. And we shared early builds of software and hardware so we could give each other feedback on the work in progress—I think I wrote more than 10 pages of feedback myself on the Nokia Pro Camera app as it was being developed.

We also added new features to the Windows Phone code— improving the zoom capability of our photo viewer, for example, so you can zoom in further on a larger-resolution image. A lot of the work we do in Windows Phone is “under the covers”—but the results show both in the killer new phones that have been coming out month after month and in the software that Nokia has delivered on the platform.

My emphasis, of course, but the fact that this code improvement has been done by Microsoft, rather than by Nokia, lends credence to my fervent hope that this important fix will be rolled into Windows Phone platform updates sooner rather than later.

The technology to enable this "extra" zooming is possibly based on the RAJPEG (Random Access JPEG) technology that Nokia briefly talked about at the launch on the Nokia Lumia 1020. RAJPEG allows a specific portion of a JPEG image to be decoded (rather than the whole thing), thus reducing the memory and processor overhead when viewing (e.g. zooming) or processing images. RAJPEG was developed by Scalado, a company that Nokia acquired last summer. It's not entirely clear how much of this technology will make it back into more 'standard' Windows Phones without the 1020's dual capture system.

To give you an idea of the difference this new code will make to Windows Phone's photo handling (and onward handling, e.g. when sharing by email), here are screenshots of the same dandelion photo, taken on a Lumia 920, and then viewed, zoomed in on the phone, using first the default Windows Phone 'Photos' system and then the third party HD Photo Viewer:

In short, great to see this addressed after the complaints of many. I'm sure it will be in the Lumia 1020 from the start, but will be eagerly testing my Lumia 920 and 925 after their next official platform over the air updates in August and hoping that faster, more detailed image displays will turn up. Watch this space!

Kevin Shields and Joe Belfiore