Video: Nokia 808 PureView: 5 years in the making – (Shot on Nokia 808 PureView) + Sample pics!

| May 21, 2012 | 79 Replies

Super quick heads up – there’s a new video from Nokia, filmed from the Nokia 808 PureView. Check out the team behind possibly the most anticipated phone, and definitely the hottest camera for 2012.

Shot entirely on the Nokia 808 PureView http://nokia.ly/J5CWGs our all-access documentary brings you the full exclusive story behind the creation of this revolutionary new smartphone and the ground-breaking technology that lies within.

And back to revision >_>

by 

Update: Here’s an accompanying article at NokConv with some new sample pics!

http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/05/21/making-the-nokia-808-pureview-%E2%80%93-exclusive-video-documentary/

 

 

Category: Nokia, Symbian, Video

About the Author ()

Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and  Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.com

Comments (79)

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  1. lordstar says:

    Gorgeous pic. Seems like Nokia’s preppin to launch the 808! Good stuff!

    • Ximena Navarrete says:

      I can’t hide this anymore.. but I guess it’s about time I also reveal this to you all.. (as if you care lol! I’m nobody)

      I have a big crush on Damian for so long but the wedding ring really breaks my heart every time it’s flashed. I guess they do that on purpose, you know, show us his wedding ring so *I* would stop fantasizing about him. He’s also a CEO-material unlike that Elop. *swoons*

      • Eric says:

        That was a hilarious post!

        Too bad you have to cope with that wedding ring in the video xD.

      • a3x says:

        haha! Are you sure is a crush? crushes are usually short term, yet you used the the phrase “for so long”.

        Still it’s quite impressive that I see nokia related videos and the last thing I would notice is a wedding ring.

  2. flopjoke says:

    Damn, this mobile phone never ceases to amaze me. Damn it, Jay.. stop distracting me! Got exam in a couple of hours xD

  3. Shriek says:

    Awesome video, great clarity :D can’t wait

    • lordstar says:

      Such an inspiring video.

      We should sketch more on napkins yes? Hehe! Amazing that the idea came from a conversation and a drawing on a napkin in a hotel.

  4. Mapantz says:

    The picture of the water crashing on to the beach .. did the Nokia 808 take that? :O

  5. NeNoRmAl says:

    Quality in some parts of the video wasn’t that good to be honest…

    Also, Demian again said that it’s not about the 41 megapixels it’s about PureView technology
    I agree, but almost every single hands on/review over the web is showing mainly how the phone can take full res photos and then how many times you can zoom in on them, which is really frustrating…

    Where are the mind blowing PureView pics?Advertise them to the public!

    And don’t get me wrong, but 400 people working on 808?Really?
    I love 808, but let’s just compare those 400 to the total number of people that worked on the amazing N9 project, I suspect the difference will be shocking…

    • Ebon & Unicorn N9s says:

      400? Where did it say 400? The figure I remember is 50 people worked on this project. Besides this PureView tech is more than a phone. It will find its way to many devices.

      • Aliqudsi says:

        50 for the camera and imaging-

        400 on the phones as a whole = software plus design plus Gallery/Camera UI etc…

        @NeNoRmAl I don’t understand do you think 400 is too much or too little? Of course the N9 would have more since it was built from scratch- a full OS that had no successor to improve off of.

        ANyways watch in 1080P and shiver.

        • Ebon & Unicorn N9s says:

          Thanks for the clarification.

          The number depends on the criteria used. If it includes everyone from Designing, developing, testing & managing on software & hardware side and also includes the people who do the product’s feasibility for production, it is a good one.

        • NeNoRmAl says:

          Wasn’t the team behind the N9 quite small?

          So, I was comparing the number of people involved/results ratio.

          • Ebon & Unicorn N9s says:

            The whole N9 team size at the start was decent but it later started to decrease with people either resigning or being moved to other projects.

          • Maybe says:

            The cost should be lower as Lumia 800 and 900 stolen the same design as well. Beside that, regarding MeeGo which shouldn’t be stopped in the first place as it is part of Qt ecosystem for the superphone. Expensive N9 cause the project has been stopped, less apps cause N9 is the only phone using MeeGo and Qt ecosystem was stopped as well until Elop realize that making WP as the third ecosystem was not as easy as thought and if anyone realize he never talk about WP/3rd ecosystem anymore cause it is a total failure.

            Then he decided to proceed with Meltemi and Qt after realized that it is the only way to pump more money into Nokia (Lumia to be exact). So he realizes that going for WP is like going for Android but even worse than Android. As for Android, the phone maker can make tweak for the UI but not for WP. Plus, can have different hardware for Android and more freedom to differentiate from other companies. In the other hand, the only way to differentiate WP is just the phone design and add-on apps.

    • James says:

      Symbian teams have history always been notably larger, yes.
      But the difference wouldn’t have been that huge through all of 2010 & some of 2011.
      From about mid-2011 onward though, the harmattan team has shrunk dramatically.
      It’s almost 100% downsized now compared to Feb. 2011
      They’ve vacated their original offices etc…
      anyway this is totally off-topic….

  6. Ebon & Unicorn N9s says:

    The proud look on the faces of the people in the video tells its own story..

  7. dss says:

    its amazing that they are using the product they are selling, to create some of it’s own marketing..

  8. Dave says:

    I’m intrigued by that flowing water shot.

    Tripod, long exposure shutter, possibly some manual control over the ND filter? Considerably more creative control in there than any previous mobile camera?

    I wish they’d stop teasing us and release the effing thing now!

    • Dave says:

      Replying to myself, how sad ….

      But from the Flickr image @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/7239753742/in/set-72157629826156568/

      “ND filter manually forced on to use the long exposure time to blur the water.”

      Please let this be a standard feature. Please, pretty please. Its something I’ve wanted on the N8 for as long as I’ve owned it!

      • Mapantz says:

        Yeah, exactly the same thoughts from me. :-)

        • Recruta says:

          It is a standard feature. Check the camera UI and you will see the option of taking both pictures and videos with the ND filter on.

      • dss says:

        It is standard, there is an option to turn the ND filter on/off.. it still doesn’t give you precise control of the shutter speed tho.. you kind of have to guess what’s going on

        • Recruta says:

          Yeah, that’s the sad part. Still we won’t be able to take long exposures… I wonder why Nokia does that!

          • dss says:

            the pixels are too small..

            longer exposures on such a small sensor = a lot of noise..

            • Recruta says:

              Hummm… I thought that the Pureview tech was put in that camera to help avoiding it… Then it makes no sense not allowing us to take even 2 second exposure shots with it.

              My Pixon 12 was capable of taking wonderful 1s shots @ ISO 50. Imagine what the 808 could do with these settings.

              • dss says:

                Yes.. pureview helps a lot, but I don’t think i can replace a true/native 5,0+ micron pixel … maybe one day :)

                • dss says:

                  Oh, and yes.. they should at least give us some freedom..2-3 secs would be great, and let us deal with the noise

                • Recruta says:

                  Man, no need to have 5 micron pixels. Compacts from the Stone Age could do 30 seconds exposures. Sony DSC from the early days are examples of that.

              • Eric says:

                Maybe the stock camera app wont let you, so in time another app may help you? Also, if it has timelapse features maybe they can add the long exposure later?

          • Damian Dinning says:

            You can shoot with speeds down to 2.7 seconds if you use one of the manual ISO settings.

            In auto it limits the speeds to 1/8 to keep some people out of trouble.

        • Dave says:

          Still, that is part the way there – and there isn’t another company around putting ND filters into their mobiles, and its not available on any compact (not counting bridge types).

          Tripod, ND filter on, set camera on a 5 second timer, sit back and play!

  9. Edmund says:

    i love the swagger in the team… “best imaging ever on a mobile device”… PERIOD.

  10. steelicon says:

    My stars! Stop teasing already and start shipping and selling!

  11. Recruta says:

    Man, Nokia sometimes is indeed disgusting when it comes to the time it takes for them to launch a product after its announcement. Look at Samsung, for instance. They’ve opted for NOT having the SIII launched at Barcelona back in February. Instead, it’s got presented just some weeks ago.

    Here in Brazil, and in pretty much everywhere else, it’s gonna be launched at the beginning of June, with its pre-orders already being accepted. Its pre order price here is not ridiculously expensive as the current price of the iPhone 4s as well. In absolute terms, in fact, it’s lower than the price of the iPhone 4S, and just around 100 dolars more than what Nokia asks for the Lumia 800!!

    That’s really something.

    Now look at the 808 sitrep from Nokia Brazil: they don’t even have it featured in the Brazilian web site. There’s no official statement for its availability here, even though we know it’s going be made here as well.

    They prefer to stick to the hardly sold Lumia line, with its nothing-more-than-average-hardware, being sold for a quad-core class price.

    When I talk about Quad-core this time, people need to bear in mind that it’s not only about sheer processing power. It’s about what you can do with it (sorry about this phrase, I know it’s part of some old Nokia’s campaign – it’s not the tech, it’s what you do with it).

    You see, with that kind of CPU and GPU units, you can have the ability to have a PC level of web browsing, a magnificent HD display, and almost all sorts of things that a modern mid class LAPTOP can handle.

    FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, NOKIA: WAKE UP!!

    • SLAYER says:

      if nokia announced the 808 two weeks ago, people would automatically compare it to the S3 and talk crap about it.

      same goes to samsung, can you imaging if they announced the s3 back in mwc when nokia got all these awards?

      • Recruta says:

        Well, people who would talk crap about the 808 don’t need to wait to do it. They would do that pretty much any time.

        And I don’t care about the S III, I only appreciate that Samsung is much quicker than Nokia at launching their products to various markets.

        Nobody has a official statement of when we will be getting the 808. We only know that India, Middle East and Russia will be getting it first. We know a relative timing, not an absolute one.

  12. dss says:

    this is crazy.. if this thing produces that kind of quality on a regular basis..

    this is at 100%.. the quality is staggering. We are still talking about a smartphone here

    http://i.imgur.com/Qel6I.jpg

    • Quantom says:

      Well yeah it is at 100%, but on the pureview mode at 5mpx. We already know that the phone is capable of ~38mpx, so what you may think is a fully zoomed in 5mpx is actually the result of pixel binning from a capture much greater than 5mpx. But that’s precisely what pureview is all about anyway.

      If someone were to use the zoom function on the 808 and take such a similar shot, it’ll be nowhere near as close in quality because no pixel binning is involved.

  13. Recruta says:

    But still I am worried about the severe brightness degradation towards the sides of the frame. Look at the roses picture of the new set at flickr:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/7239754382/in/set-72157629826156568

    The left portion of the frame is much darker than the rest of it. That’s utterly strange.

  14. 101 says:

    enough with the teasing already my heart(& mind) cant take anymore, release the damn thing already.

  15. Sym^3 says:

    @1:28 New Device??

  16. Sonny says:

    why do they use that silly tiles everytime they show the next chapter! This is not WP!!!

  17. Lord US says:

    It’s a nice camera. Unfortunately that’s all what the 808 has to offer compared to the competition. I just can’t understand how Nokia thinks they can survive by releasing products like 808?

    They should have done that with Android or postponing it untill it can be done with WP. That way the people who will buy it just for the camera would probably go for WP. Possibly with some whining but with that camera and no option for getting the same with Symbian most of them would have gone that way.

    • 101 says:

      can you please elaborate as to how exactly is the 808 behind the competition?

      • zymo says:

        Although I like the 808, I have to admit that Symbain has quite a few drawbacks. I used the Galaxy Nexus for a while and to be fair it is a gorgeous device. Web browsing is pure joy, the email client is great, the UI is pretty fluid and the display with it HD resolution is just a pleasure to look at.

        • osg says:

          I played with SE RAY and it’s pile of crap. Beautiful hardware, but the OS is terrible. Run a few apps and it LAGS, horribly lags. I got back to symbian and yeah – it’s not fluid, but that’s all about it.

          I’ll get 808 over android instantly. F..k elop.

          • zymo says:

            Sorry, but you are comparing a “high-end” symbian device with a lower midrange Android device (Single Core, 512MB RAM). Try the GNEX, no lags.

    • zymo says:

      “I just can’t understand how Nokia thinks they can survive by releasing products like 808?”

      The 808 is a niche product, it wasn’t ever meant to be the “SALVATION”, it should just show the world that Nokai is still capable of doing great stuff

      • Lord US says:

        Nokia should stop making niche products and start shipping handsets on volumes. It’s just stupid to show off what you can do while you are heading towards bankruptcy.

        They should focus on Lumia if they are going to sell it in the future. Symbian has been proclaimed dead and it has suffered years from bad reputation. Basically upgrading the camera won’t wive you a killer phone. It gives you an older Symbian phone with a killer camera.

        • Beelzebozo says:

          WP is such a shitty OS that it cannot handle PureView.

          Only Symbian can handle that technology. That tells something about how good an OS Symbian really.

          So it’s Symbian or no PureView at all.

          • Ali Abdulla says:

            i never used win phone,
            but saying that it cant handle the pureview is amature at this stage, no official nokia spokesman confessed so..

            if u ask me, the pureview in symbian has been under development for FIVE years, and we are talking about symbian, where nokia has hundreds of symbian programmers. do you really expect nokia to invent a windows phone pureview in few months? with almost zero windows phone programmers(especially imaging wise)?.. and no, they cant just ask microsoft to do it, this is a serious private tech.

            do u know whats shitty? developer support in symbian, and their shitty rushed ports..
            and the shitty processors that nokia forces us to use, what other company still uses Arm11 ? this is ancient shit, or is it a limitation of Symbian? whose shitty now?
            ==
            having said that, im still sticking with symbian(N8-> 808) , but stop being a fanboy.. plz.

            • Lord US says:

              It took 5 years for Nokia to develop the PureView technology. That’s actually incredible how much time they managed to burn in that thing since PV is basically just a huge sensor with some additional ASIC to process the pixel samplings. That’s not even anything new since regulard camera manufacturers have been delivering pixel merging tech for years now. Sure, the pixel count is something that’s truly huge but that’s mostly it.

              My bet is that most of the time was spent to write device drivers for Symbian. And that’s what really cost’s money and that precious time Nokia don’t have. If they manage to pull out PV for WP in say two years, that will pretty much prove WP programming model superior to the Symbian.

              It’s hard to imagine any fundamental issues that would prevent the WP from getting the PV tech since the PV module basically provides an image with pixel merging already done. Now if the WP models will require more horse power to handle that kinds of data streams, then that’s the way it goes. Besides time for writing the drivers for WP and adding the required HW power, there is little that could actually prevent PV on WP what it comes to HW and SW.

              Issues with other matters are a different thing but those can be solved if there is the will to do that.

              • 101 says:

                it is only logical that it would take less time to port pv to wp since the tech is already there, as for with they had to build everything from the ground up.

                • 101 says:

                  *with symbian* i mean

                • Lord US says:

                  Sure, it will take less time to port PureView for another platform. However it’s hard to understand why that port would have to be such an hard task to do. After all PV is essentially an camera module providing images up to huge resolutions. All the stuff with calculating averages of the pixels is done without the main CPU of the mobile phone.

                  The API for that module is somewhat more complex compared to standard camera found on regular phones. While it’s more complex it’s not insanely difficult to program with.

                  Now, while WP could probably handle most of the tasks required by a PV camera, missing just one essential feature will prevent the usage of that module in a WP handset. That is, before Microsoft provides WP with the missing features.

                  One can say Symbian is crappy because it can’t support huge screen resolutions. Or that WP is crappy because it can’t handle the full API for an PV module. It’s just a matter of coding those features into the OS. Putting in the support for a PV module isn’t a trivial thing to do but it certainly isn’t rocket science.

                  • steelicon says:

                    I think they spent the first 2-3 years trying to find an idea for optical zoom. When that didn’t work out, they came up with the idea of lossless digital zoom, ergo the 41MP. Prolly thought that up on the latter part of the 5 year development. Then spent the remaining years in actually building the tech from ground up.

                    Just guessing.

                    • Lord US says:

                      Your guess may be a good one. On the other hand I had the impession that they got the idea of a huge sensor 5 years ago. If so, getting the big sensor built took probably lot’s of time. Even Symbian can’t be so hard to program that it would take several years just to write drivers for such a thing. After all PureView is just a huge sensor with some pixel calculations. Huge sensor but still just evolution for some older tech.

                      Thinking about the workload writing the Symbian drivers for PV, it’s sad that those things can’t be done just by using purely the Qt framework. You have to do code for the underlying Symbian OS and that can be a tricky task.

  18. CapitanSevilla says:

    This video gives me the impression that they are really proud of their product. So much, that makes me think that this could really be the last big Symbian mobile (maybe they will release new ones until 2016; but I don´t think that will be better than the 808).
    I´m really sad if this comes finally true.
    Maybe I should buy an 808.

  19. pradeep says:

    See, that’s where Nokia differs so much from Samsung and HTC…its video like these that make their mobile device all the more affable for me…compare this to Samsung’s “unpacked event” for launch of SIII, it was plain jane disappointing….
    All that blabber about nature and “designed for human” (as in what?? other fone were designed for dogs??) just wasn’t enticing enuff for such a potent smartphone….in the end, the SIII, and for that matter any samsung or htc product don’t warm the heart…kudos to 808 team for this amazing fone! M looking forward to own it as soon as it is available in India.

  20. torcida says:

    AMAZING – the making of just as the new sample pictures!!!!
    Thanks Nokia

  21. Beelzebozo says:

    Holy SHIT! That video and those pictures! Especially the first one with waves hitting the shore. PureBeauty. :) It’s impossible to take that kind of photo with any other phone.

    Now take one step further and give us the control of the shutter speed and aperture. Pretty please PureView team…

  22. Beelzebozo says:

    Every single smartphone buyer/user should see this video in full 1080p HD. And that wave photo. Especially those who are interested in photography. I wonder how many could resist buying 808 after seeing what it can do.

    808 is a quantum leap. It’s just so far ahead of anything else, even the great N8. 808 is putting all other phone manufacturers (and most camera manufacturers) to shame.

  23. stylinred says:

    eh the video quality doesnt seem to be that good imo in this one… their faces lack detail imo and seem somewhat blotchy like DNR (digital noise reduction) was applied too much

    • Quantom says:

      Agreed. The interview sections make the edges of their faces look really too soft. It’s a little disappointing since I thought we had the pureview going on even in video mode.

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