Nokia steps in with 41 Mega-pixel phone camera

Just when it seemed like the cellphone megapixel war had settled down, Nokia blew the competition away with a 41MP camera in its new Nokia 808.

It’s been a standing feature with the arrival of cameras on cellphones. Recently, the megapixels were standardised at 8MP and 12MP (though some phones boast more) as the focus has shifted to other phone features, and the quality of images has reached a plateau.

Now the Nokia 808 PureView, with its whopping 41MP lens, is the unassailable leader. But it’s not just the megapixels that count. A camera, especially one inside a cellphone, is about more than just the size of its sensor, which is what the megapixels refer to. Nokia has been including Carl Zeiss optics – the rest of the camera’s innards – in its phones.

Because the 808 has such a large megapixel count, it lets you “capture an image, then zoom, reframe, crop and re-size afterwards to expose previously unseen levels of details”.

It has taken a Nokia research team five years to build the camera phone, which means it runs on Symbian, the antiquated operating system that Nokia abandoned a year ago to focus on Windows Phone 7 for its smartphones.

-Jago News-