Just Posted: Nokia 808 PureView Review

Has everyone in the world got a kick Nokia schedule. This is a PHONE yes a PHONE and for the average guy in the street something he can use for his snapshots its not an SLR its not a high end point and shoot. The Symbian system is perfectly adequate it has loads of useful grown up apps unless of course you want to play "shoot the zombie rebel kill everything that moves"
Why don't the major phone networks offer it it seems that everyone wants to knock Nokia. By the way I have a Samsung smartphone which has a poor camera so I miss some great shots that pop up out of the blue, I would change my contract for this Nokia if it was offered. So come on lets get real its a PHONE with a very good camera!!

Why someone has to buy a phone with an incapable ( ball breaking ) O.S, paying almost 700 euros when the same time with the same amount of money can have a DSLR and a phone ...

I can't conceive the need some of us have to give this cam-phone such a free promotion, again and again... and again.

Are they in fact crypto-sales representatives of Nokia flooding every web sites ? Are they just would-be buyers who are not so sure of their own choice and are looking for others reaction to comfort themselves in their futur purchase decision ?

are we still comparing it against DSLRs and high end compacts that were all made with a single purpose in mind, and that is to take pictures ? Well .. that speaks volumes for the product...

The 808 created its own category, and it should be looked as a ratio between size/functionality vs. picture quality. Show me anything else on the market, that can produce that kind of quality/flexibility, in such a small package. The sensor module in the 808 is wayyy smaller than anything that comes even close in terms of quality.. I am not even going to mention the optics, because that is another masterpiece from Zeiss, which deserves a lot of credit.

Though the reviewer touched on bad highlight clipping, he also added that such problem is prevalent in compacts or any other camera phone.
I agree with him that you can judge a small photo whether it is taken with a compact or DSLR by just looking at the DR or lack of it.

Bad handling of highlights is obvious in today's cameras. Manufacturers can get away with more MP because people are just looking at the resolution and noise performance. Noise is muffled with noise reduction and reduced through better electronics but handling highlights require big, fat, old fashioned photosites.

I still consider this Nokia very good compared to plenty compacts out there.

The rendering technology of the PureView Nokia (oversampling) should be benchmarked to normal cameras of various classes and sensor sizes to evaluate its real value.

As we learned from the interview embedded in the review: the oversampling technology is protected as Nokia's own. Could this technology be adopted by the camera makers? ?

Would the same Nokia camera without the smartphone be a viable product option for the masses? ?

how many loosers around?!... look upstairs, then click - sample image/studio comparison tool - and put what ever you like against 808 (except d800) , and on martini bootle try to read "alessandria year" on ANY FF camera! no way Hose.. and on Nokia 808 you can.
Of course, nobody here will try to put 808 in dark, to put brighter , sharper lens, zoom's , have ergonomics and other aspects Dslr's can do. But Nokia 808 HAVE REAL RESOLUTION! (probably real 30MP) Period :)

One thing to remember: Nokia 808 does waaay better than all Canon/Nikon/xxx DSLRs and compact cameras in making phone calls and sending SMS. In fact, I have never trusted my Canon 550D with a SIM card, it fits in SD card slot badly...

There is simply no way that I will change my DSLR for one of those. Proper camera is what i use the most and phone well texts and conversations. i'll keep it that way.

I wonder who will revolutionarise smartphones with an electric toothbrush, or with a milk frother? Those two are in fact useful ideas.

After having looked through the samples gallery I'm impressed with the quality from this camera phone, but then again it doesn't even stand up very well to my 10 year old nikon Coolpix 4500 and it certainly lacks far behind the image quality that we all have become used to from dedicated cameras like S100, J1/V1, RX100, 4/3, NEX etc. just to mention a few examples.

The fact is that this is a camera phone with a small lens and even though quality has improved immensely (here mostly by down sampling) then it is just a camera phone that do not stand up very well to a real camera in terms of image quality.

I'm sure that will change over the next few years and the gap between this type of camera and dedicated cameras will become much closer.

@rpm40,
"It may be more challenging to shoot a nice photo with a cameraphone than with a top end dslr..."

But it is more challenging to most people to open even an entry-level DSLR user's manual and learn all its features and subtleties. That is why P&S cameras sell more than DSLRs (apart from price/weight/size) and people use their cameraphone...

The 808 incorporates several leading edge technologies. Mainstream camera manufacturers must be asking themselves why they didn't come up with such ideas first.

Even with last years Nokia 701, i made nice photos and 1 was printed by a magazine (i removed all Exif first). Yes, hi-iso images look like watercolor paintings - but only at pixel level, at a lower level they look nice and are good memories of relaxed evenings without logging a real camera around.

Some apps for Symbian are missing i guess, including useful GPS tracker and Nokias can't be connected with new cameras to be controlled via Android (i'd love live view on an external device).

Some nice things about my Nokia 701:
- solid Old World build quality
- dedicated button for camera on, then snap
- dedicated toggle button for screen off + screen locked, then screen on + unlocked
- LED flash/video light useful as torchlight
- general ease of use
- alarm clock usable when phone OFF
- navigation with maps WITHOUT connecting to internet or mobile service provider in many countries

I made good use of all these features mentioned above. I just wish there was a Nokia for Android.

Finally people realized that the more mp, the better. Let the megapixel war begin(again)!

In dpr studio comparison tool i find ONLY one DSLR ( Nikon D800) have better resolution than Nokia 808 ??? Is there something wrong with my eyes?

Phone aside, are there any apps for this thing?

Will be interesting to see how it evolves -- if Nokia could run Android or Windows, they would have a winner.

Are the blown-out highlights the result of too many photosites for such a small sensor?

When I used the studio shot comparison tool, to me the Nokia 808 resolved more detail than the best Canon and Nikon dslr cameras! Compact cameras were not even close.
How is that possible?

The big deal breaker for me, of the 808 as a camera is the abysmal highlight clipping and the highlight roll-off that, well, doesn't roll.

This, the less than wonderful high ISO performance, and the unfriendly form-factor make it extremely unlikely that enthusiasts will stop buying high end P&S anytime soon. But I do applaud Nokia for pushing the envelope in the camera-phone space.

Ｓｉｍｐｌｙ　【First phone with "camera"】　Ｂｒａｖｏ!

I feel like duct taping a Galaxy III to a Sony RX 100. Sony could probably do a more elegant job than I, of course.

As far as I'm concerned, I do not care going out without my phone as I don't use it so much, but I absolutely can't bear being without any camera. Thus, I wonder if one day, we won't have such a news not about a phone that can be used as a "quite good" camera but about a camera than can be used as a phone. I think, by the way, that the time is near when the "phone function" won't be an independent one and it will be added on demand as an application to any item of your choice: a watch, a pair of sunglasses, a key holder, a shoe... It will get smart ! In that case only, I will maybe be interested in a "camera that can take good pictures". Otherwise, out of the question !

These convergence appliances leave me cold. I don't even use the video function on my cameras. I prefer something that does one thing exceptionally well, over things that can do a lot of things somewhat well.

I realize there are lots of people who love the camera phone concept, but I really think Dpreview is casting their net much too widely now.

If they decided to start reviewing security cameras or endoscopes then someone would probably be thrilled. Because after all... they are also cameras of a sort.

IMHO, there are still plenty of real cameras that need reviewing... and that should be the priority of this website.

However, it's not my website. I am just a non-paying guest. And even with all this newly added clutter, Dpreview is still a great website.

So my opinion is just that. My opinion.

What if someone rings while you're taking a snapshot?

Nice review but why are all the comment from last evening gone?

Clear example of my statement, that cameraphones make excellent representations of the thing you point the lens at, but make totally uninteresting photographs.

Images are flat with no pop but if you're planning on dirtying it up on instagram and posting it on facebook or twitter who cares.

Can someone explain to me what this means for how lenses limit resolution?
I was under the impression from reading around here that even DSLR lenses were limiting the Nikon D800?

I thought this phone would run the RX100 very close

sadly from what I've seen in the photo comparison with it and the Nikon V1, it seems there is a very sizable gap between it and the 1 inch sensor cameras out there.

It seems even the Canon S100 is better (can't be too sure with the Canon strong noise reduction)

phone cameras have a long long way to go before they kill off P&S like the RX100

It would be interesting to compare it - on the studio comparison tool - against the Sony RX100.

I'm not a fan of the colors I'm seeing.

I might be wrong, but it seems like the camera industry has a more reasonable take on patents than the mobile device sector, be it tablets of phones. I'd hate to see the convergence between mobile devices and cameras introduce the egregious level of patent-trolling and lawsuits that is taking place in the mobile phone/tablet sector into camera development.

I don't think I would ever buy an P&S again. Its something like the 808+DSLR .. everything in between doesn't make much sense to me.

Nikon D800 + Nokia 808 .. that combo would cover 100% of my needs.

The marriage of camera manufacturers and mobile phones are inevitable.

These two separate items sell on their own right, and combining them only increases the desirability of the product.

The camera features of this gadget is good, but the Nokia phone interface is something a lot of disappointed and badly burned previous users would recall as a painful memory.

Put this camera on an iPhone, HTC or Samsung and it will shine. Nokia has to clean up it's interface first.

.

Great review! Times are changing...

I've had the smartphone for almost 2 weeks now, got it from amazon.. its an amazing device. The camera might not be the best, bit in terms of flexibility vs. size ratio, there is nothing else out there that can even come close.

Nokia did an amazing job overall.. it took them over 4 years to bring it to production..