History Repeating Itself? Nokia and Samsungs Camera War

Let’s admit it, in our minds the two top qualities that we seem to associate with Nokia are build quality and amazing cameras, for the past decade or so Nokia have been blowing us away with some of the most amazing imaging technologies we’ve ever dreamt of; from the N82 and N95, to the N8 and 808 and more recently with the 920/928/925 and hopefully next month the EOS. It seems however that there is a pattern of sorts emerging between Nokia and Samsung, the two seem to be releasing their camera flagships on about the same cycle, this pattern has been mostly hidden by the fact that most of Samsung’s phones were absolute garbage.

Back when Nokia released the N95 in 2006 with the then revolutionary 5 megapixel camera, Samsung went ahead and introduced their G800 with 5 megapixels of its own and the slogan “Photographer’s choice”. No thanks I’ll pass.

Then around the time Nokia released the N8 with its amazing 12 Mp camera (which remains to this day one of the best imaging devices out there) Samsung released the M8910 Pixar, with a 12 Mp camera. Once again Nokia killed it in terms of imaging performance, and Samsung’s device fell into obscurity.

More recently (last year) Samsung pretty much gave up on the phone part of camera phones, and pushed out the Galaxy Camera, which was basically a point and shoot camera running android (and 4G connectivity), with the slogan”Camera. Reborn”. But surprise surprise, we were unimpressed with its results as it failed to beat the Camera king, the crazy 41Mp wielding Nokia 808

And of course just a few weeks ago Samsung announced its latest imaging oriented device, the “galaxy zoom”, although it looks as if Samsung chose to pretend that their previous attempts at a proper imaging device never happened; given the first sentence of their press release:

A revolutionary new device that converges the best of a high performance smartphone and camera, the GALAXY S4 zoom delivers the best of both worlds

 Of course we have yet to see what Nokia’s EOS will offer in terms of actual imaging performance, but if the past few years are anything to go by I think it’s safe for Nokia to mock Samsung’s attempts all they want.

Of course even the best camera phone in the world would mean absolutely nothing if Nokia don’t market the hell out of it, so please Nokia; making a great device isn’t enough, don’t wait for people to buy it, you have to SELL it.

Category: Lumia, Nokia, Symbian, Windows Phone