All About Symbian puts Nokia 808 PureView against Samsung Galaxy SIV Zoom

Steve Litchfield puts the Nokia 808 PureView up against Samsung’s contender for ‘smartphone camera’.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/17932_Crossover_smartphones_Nokia_80.php

It certainly does help to read this on a big screen. I initially opened the link from my 920 and some of the Sammy pictures looked surprisingly better but on the bigger screen, I noticed the 808 pulls in the better image (where Steve was undecided).

Check out how oversampling works on this scene. It’s a crop of a centre of the pool pic. The 808 is at the top.

This test though does cater for the SIV’s strengths in zooming. The 808 features ‘lossless’ digital zooming whilst the massive SIV Zoom quite rightly shoves in 10x optical zoom which for the most part, Engadget slated as being a messy marriage of smartphone and camera. http://mynokiablog.com/2013/07/15/engadget-samsung-siv-zoom-messy-marriage-of-smartphone-and-camera-might-want-to-hold-out-for-nokia-lumia-1020/

It’s surprising therefore to see it pull slightly in the lead against the 808, no? Perhaps this is where that added versatility from the optical zoom wins out.

Basically, when there is no zooming involved, the 808 will win every time.

As ever, it’s instructive to add up the scores: Nokia 808 PureView: 76/100, Samsung S4 Zoom: 79/100. Giving the overall win very slightly to the Android-running S4 Zoom, though as I’ll explain in the third part of this feature, beating the Nokia 808 comes at something of a huge price in terms of bulk and form factor. It’s actually a big compliment to the 808 that Samsung have had to go this far into standalone camera component territory in order to finally pull ahead of the Symbian phone.

In terms of the strengths of each device, it’s clear that the Nokia 808 PureView wins every time when no zooming is involved, but that optical zoom beats PureView zoom every time once the level gets near 3x or beyond. Which is as expected – physics usually wins, as I’ve been saying about the Nokia 808 sensor for ages, in comparison to other tiny-sensored phones like the iPhone and Xperia Z. However, with the S4 Zoom we have a device which, in one respect at least, manages to out gun the 808 in terms of physics, with its huge optical zoom.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/17932_Crossover_smartphones_Nokia_80.php

Where does that leave the 1020? Well it’s a good thing Nokia’s positioning it as zoom reinvented. It’s not about initially zooming it at first, it’s about taking the picture and then reframing it and recomposing the picture later. Even if you did zoom in, you can zoom back out and do the picture again without having to go back on that scene. The SIV Zoom can’t do that. Actually, the 808 can’t either, if you zoom in at least before snapping the shot.

I expect Apple, if they continue to do what they do with regards to marketing, is to come up with some new gimmick thing with their camera to make it more interesting too. If they simply launch it with a better 12MP camera, then we’d expect the 1020 to easily trounce it at least where perception is concerned.

Cheers spacemodel for the tip!

Category: Nokia, Symbian