[cross posted to AAS, where Nokia 808 owners will recognise a lot of the quality here, even if the strengths and weaknesses of the two devices are slightly different]
From Jeremy's intro:
This is why you want a 41-megapixel sensor in a phone. As we noted in our Nokia Lumia 1020 review, as well as in our Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom face-off, this smartphone’s camera is best-in-class. In fact, this Windows Phone blows away every other handset on the market under most conditions, and it gives you an impressive amount of creative control. But how does the Lumia 1020 fare in the hands of a pro? We took the 1020 all around New York to capture images in a variety of settings. Here are our photos and impressions.
We're then into the ten example photos, each on its own page, but perhaps the most illustrative of the Lumia 1020 camera's strengths is this one, taken as-is and then 'reframed later' for more pleasing effect. The full shot is inset, bottom left:
The Imagine mosaic at Strawberry Fields in Central Park is perhaps one of its business attractions, so getting a chance to get in close enough to shoot what I wanted was out of the question. As I had done for the Yankee Stadium photo, I took a wide shot (the insert in the lower left), then recomposed and saved a tight image that was in focus, with good exposure and composition.
See here for the full set of ten shots and comments.
In Nokia's original marketing for the Lumia 1020, the 'reframing' was usually of the 'zoom in at capture time and then decide later on to take in the wider shot' variety, but in the real world the chances are high that your use will follow Jeremy's example, shooting a scene and then cropping in tightly later on. Cynics will say that you can take a photo and crop in later on any smartphone camera, but the point is that, for the first 2.5x zoom at least, the megapixel count on the sensor is so high that you're still using more pixels than you need for the final image and so you can maintain a full 5 megapixel output without actually losing information. Taking a similar image on, for example, an iPhone, you'd be down to around a 1 megapixel output by the time you'd cropped in this far.
I've written about this PureView flexibility before, of course, in the context of the Nokia 808, the 1020's predecessor, but the latter device not only makes reframing and 'smart cropping' trivial, the 1020's image processing is also better optimised for such activity.
Watch this space for more on the Lumia 1020 and Nokia's PureView 'computational photography' in due course. And don't forget that we've already reviewed the Lumia 1020 in detail, here, here (stills) and here (video).