MWC 2012: Nokia 808 PureView photo samples released

Nokia has decided to release images taken by its 808 PureView smartphone, and boy are we impressed.

The results you see below are thanks to a 41-megapixel camera and its Carl Zeiss optics.

We probably should try and explain the technology behind it, so make sure you are sitting comfortably.

Whilst you can shoot an image at 38-megapixels, Nokia has designed the camera to take fantastic quality images at 5 or 8-megapixels.

This is achieved by a sensor that is about five times as large as what you would normally find in a mobile phone. It's 1/1.2", if you were curious. In fact, it's three times larger than what you would find in the average compact camera.

The next part of the operation is down to oversampling. Instead of trying to create images four or five times larger than a 5-megapixel camera, which would allow you to blow them up to A3 size or larger, the 808 PureView focuses on oversampling the number of pixels and then pixel-bins them down to a more normal size, a la A4.

What does this mean? Well, noise is averaged out across multiple pixels, which helps keep the image quality tip top. It also means you can zoom in by as much as 2.8 times on a picture and not see a drop in quality because of the increased number of pixels. If you can imagine zooming in on a standard 5-megapixel image, you quickly see the dots as you get closer - not so with the 808 PureView.

Now as you get close the averaging effect of the pixels drops somewhat but it's still going to be a vast improvement over your average camera snapper.

Nokia's argument is that you don't need images above A4, because the average person isn't going to print out images at billboard sizes. And we can understand that.

What's hard to understand is why Nokia would release a phone with a dying operating system but at least we know it's coming to Windows Phone devices in the near future. Either way, the N8 is about to lose its crown as the king of the camera phones.