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Unfortunately, I cannot agree with some of the more positive reviews on this site. This is not because of a difference of opinion with the said reviewers, but rather because those reviews do not necessarily correctly reflect how this phone performs at this point in time.
Camera
For a phone, the camera is fantastic. It cannot compete with a MILC or even a decent compact, but for something of this proportions, I found it to work very well. There is a plenty of control options that you have probably already seen in more detailed reviews. Here are some things that are not mentioned as often:
Phone
While the camera is good, the phone itself is absolutely rubbish. Even before Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone 8.1 in favour of Windows Phone 10—thus splitting the already malnourished ecosystem in two—the software support was shoddy at best. Official Microsoft apps that were pre-installed on the phone were discontinued, third-party apps never really performed as well as their iOS or Android variants—if they were available to begin with—and Microsoft has by now laid off the vastest majority of their Windows Phone employees. Blogs like Windows Central have been chanting a mantra of how Windows Phone will recover any time now for the past five years, but so far the trip has only been downhill resulting in some incredibly amusingly apologetic articles on the said site.
A few points regarding the phone itself:
I would not recommend getting the Lumia 1020 to anyone from 2016 onward and am very glad to have sold mine. The camera is nice for a phone and definitely worlds better than the one in my iPhone 6s for most use cases, but it is once again nowhere close to a dedicated device. As a smartphone system, both Lumia 1020 and Windows Phone in general are absolute train wrecks.
You can still buy this phone and use it as a de facto "dumbphone" with an occasionally working browser and a good smartphone camera, but even in that case, you would probably be better off getting a real dumbphone and a separate budget camera, both of which will perform both in terms of their function and in terms of battery life.
Camera
For a phone, the camera is fantastic. It cannot compete with a MILC or even a decent compact, but for something of this proportions, I found it to work very well. There is a plenty of control options that you have probably already seen in more detailed reviews. Here are some things that are not mentioned as often:
- While you can control the shutter speed, I do not believe there is an official way of getting exposures longer than 4 seconds.
- The camera allows you to shoot RAW. Unfortunately, unlike JPEGs, the phone does not embed GPS data into the RAW file. On the bight side, it always shoots RAW+(Downsampled-)JPEG, meaning that you can extract the coordinates from the JPEGs themselves. It is not exactly fun, but it's a solution.
- The shooting speeds are slow, but so is the focusing speed. Trying to take pictures of moving objects in low light is almost impossible. In my case, me and my girlfriend went to an "art aquarium", where fish are swimming in fancy lighting aquariums. Her iPhone 6 focused without major issues, whereas my Lumia 1020 could not find the subject before it moved out of focus.
- RAW files come up to roughly 40 MB DNGs. Running conversion to DNG in Lightroom reduces their size by half.
Phone
While the camera is good, the phone itself is absolutely rubbish. Even before Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone 8.1 in favour of Windows Phone 10—thus splitting the already malnourished ecosystem in two—the software support was shoddy at best. Official Microsoft apps that were pre-installed on the phone were discontinued, third-party apps never really performed as well as their iOS or Android variants—if they were available to begin with—and Microsoft has by now laid off the vastest majority of their Windows Phone employees. Blogs like Windows Central have been chanting a mantra of how Windows Phone will recover any time now for the past five years, but so far the trip has only been downhill resulting in some incredibly amusingly apologetic articles on the said site.
A few points regarding the phone itself:
- Websites often perform very poorly with the built in browser, resulting in everything from incorrect display to crashing of the browser app. There are no good replacements.
- Microsoft apps, e.g. Office, are more feature rich on Android than they are on Windows Phone.
- The glass used for the display is very low quality and scratches easily. I had a Galaxy S i9000 before this and, after five years of exploitation, it still good as new. Lumia 1020 had scratches all over it after six months, despite being handles rather carefully.
- While services like Google have been increasing online storage available to you, Microsoft has been doing the polar opposite. The 30 GB I had alloted for buying the phone have now been reduced to 5 GB.
- Despite stating that all Lumia phone will get upgraded to Windows 10, Microsoft has confirmed that this will not be happening on Lumia 1020. Be wary of older news items stating otherwise.
I would not recommend getting the Lumia 1020 to anyone from 2016 onward and am very glad to have sold mine. The camera is nice for a phone and definitely worlds better than the one in my iPhone 6s for most use cases, but it is once again nowhere close to a dedicated device. As a smartphone system, both Lumia 1020 and Windows Phone in general are absolute train wrecks.
You can still buy this phone and use it as a de facto "dumbphone" with an occasionally working browser and a good smartphone camera, but even in that case, you would probably be better off getting a real dumbphone and a separate budget camera, both of which will perform both in terms of their function and in terms of battery life.
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