The latest video epic from Topolino (Tommi Vainionpää), despite the misleading title of 'Nokia Lumia 1020 video - The Power of Zoom Reinvented', does prove stunning. Although it doesn't actually showcase any of the latest PureView 'zoom/reframing' functionality, in that it's merely highlighting the detail in the 34MP 'full' resolution shots, it's still well worth watching for Tommi's artistry and Nokia's image quality. Can you imagine doing this sort of thing with any other manufacturer's phone images?

In the video's description, Tommi says:

With this video I want to demonstrate how cool is Nokia's concept "Zoom reinvented". If you choose 5MP + 34 MP image size option from Camera options, you get zoomed smaller image and unzoomed high resolution image of your object. If you later realize that your zoomed image is too tightly framed or it is not in level, you can always take the high resolution image and reframe that image again as you choose fit.

In this video I have used my high resolution images to show how much you are able to zoom in or out high resolution images afterwards. All high resolution images which I have used in this video are untouched, meaning that I have not done any kind of editing, colour, contrast adjusting etc to them, but just only pasted them to Sony Vegas video editor and added crossfading effect between the images. 

Please visit my Flickr account to see more of my Lumia 1020 images.

Without further ado, and you should take into account some quality loss from YouTube's re-encoding of the Sony Vegas re-encoding (etc.) of the original images, plus you should definitely maximise the playback window and up the quality to 1080p:

It's interesting to note, from the perspective of a user of the Nokia 808, the spiritual predecessor of the Lumia 1020, how much happier the 1020 is at full resolution. The Nokia 808 PureView was definitely optimised for oversampling, for producing noise-free, artefact-free 5MP images, with a little zooming here and there. On the 808, if you zoom in all the way (typically about 3:1), down to 1:1 on the sensor, the end result tended to be somewhat bland and unimpressive. 

In contrast, the Lumia 1020 uses a lot more image processing - colour enhancement, noise reduction and sharpening, to ensure that images are pleasant, whatever zoom/reframing has been used. Which is why the full res shots in the video above are so very usable. The downside, of course, is that this processing is always present and there's no way to revert back to the ultra-natural look of the 808's oversampled shots. But I suspect the 1020's flexibility at all zoom levels will win it an awful lot of fans.

Comments welcome - yes, Tommi's cheating a little above, but still stunning results from Nokia's latest, wouldn't you agree?