Nokia apologizes for faking Lumia 920 ad Nokia has issued an apology over charges that it sexed up the qualities of its new Lumia 920 handsets in an ad intended to show off its new image stabilization system, dubbed "PureView". The advert shows a typecast tall, thin Nordic woman riding a bicycle and funfair ride before dancing in the street, all the while being …
The use of the "pureview" brand following the 41mp 808 is misleading to some extent, essentially it's their version of the cybershot brand.
There is virtually no way they could have realistically transplanted that technology in to a svelte design like the 920.
It would have required an additional processor just for the camera.
If you read the white paper it does make some sense as to how they've tried to compensate, part 1 is using a lens with a massive aperture and 2 is to add OIS so that longer exposure times can be used. The focus is different, where the 808 was all abut detail and the ability to zoom the 920 is about low light performance and video stability. Lots of people take pictures in the evening at parties or outside blah blah blah so it's a sensible move.
I'm sure the oversized sensor(s) will return, it might take a while for that to happen, I'm fairly sure the 920 won't be as impressive a the 808 but despite all the marketing failings I suspect it'll be amongst the best if not the best mainstream smartphone camera out there.
Note that with this phone if you are prepared to knock down the output resolution you should still get some of that oversampling/lossless zoom goodness. A good quality 2mp image is completely fine for a standard print/web use.
So, assuming this is actually done with image processing (and yes, it's normal to capture a larger frame and calculate a shift within it), why have they decided to go with "optical" image stabilization? Optical solutions fix camera shake, but do nothing to handle subject movement, like the bouncing Nordic woman, which is why professional sports photographers still have large aperture lenses. In extreme cases, as here, keeping the subject static in the frame would result in the background bouncing around, due to the change in perspective from the moving camera position (something Canon have tried to fix in a stabilized macro lens, but not for riding a bike).
There *is* a lot of research into stabilizing/removing blur independently from separate bits of the image - some was presented at SIGGRAPH this year, and Adobe explicitly stated that their work on this was the reason that they'd not yet released their camera-shake-removal technology (demoed recently) in Photoshop. But "optical" it's not.
If it's image processed, you may as well own up to it. Of course, if there really a stabilization element in there, I take it all back - but it's quite possibly not the best solution.
These things always look good in demos. I'll reserve judgement until a real world test, although I don't think my DSLR is going anywhere.
The lens is house in a gyroscope type device.
It's also used so that longer exposure times can be used in the dark without blurring.
Obviously a camera on a phone won't replace a dslr, the point being that you don't take your dslr everywhere you go, at least most people don't. If you have a respectable snapper to hand you can capture anything that you happen to stumble across.
anyone who's fit to be be let loose on the streets should be aware that marketing bods are almost always guilty of overstating their case and making things look better than they really are. Personally I thought that the video was a demonstration of what image stabilisation can do, rather than what the application of image stabilisation in that particular camera actually does.
Advertising material, like instruction manuals, is usually prepared by people who have no knowledge of the item in question and it usually bears only a tangential relationship to the reality. That, after all, is why we're interested in independent reviews which will give us a more genuine assessment of what the thing is really like.
In the end of the day, if the camera on the phone in question is actually better than average, that should come out in independent reviews and all the complaints about the advert may actually serve to draw attention to what may be a good camera. If it's not a good camera, then Nokia will have brought the trouble on themselves and have no-one else to blame.
Paris, because even she isn't quite stupid enough to believe everything she sees in adverts!
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