Nokia has kicked off its press conference at 2012’s Mobile World Congress with a shocker, unveiling a new smartphone that features a 41-Megapixel camera. Yes, fourty-one whole megapixels. We didn’t forget to put a decimal place between the 4 and the 1 either.
The new Nokia PureView 808 runs on Nokia’s latest Symbian software; the Belle update. It resembles older Nokia devices such as the N97, especially with the large camera bulge on the back. That bulge accommodates the whopping 41-Megapixel sensor as well as a fairly hefty Xenon flash.
The rear camera is capable of recording video in Full HD 1080p quality, and it’ll capture Dolby Digital Plus audio for premium quality. It also features ‘Rich Recording’ technology, which Nokia says will allow the user to make CD-quality audio recordings using their smartphone.
Nokia plans to push the boundaries with cameraphones, starting with the 808 PureView, so we could see more of this insane camera tech appearing in the company’s Windows Phones in the future.
We’d heard from a BGR report that Nokia had plans to release a cameraphone at MWC with ‘the largest sensor size you’ve ever seen on a phone’, and the report has turned out to be bang on the money – although we never dreamt of a 41-Megapixel sensor.
Slashgear reports from its hands-on time with the device that the image size is never actually a true 41-Megapixel image, instead you’ll get 38-Megapixel quality or 34-Megapixels if you take a landscape shot.
The oversized sensor makes up for the lack of zoom in the PureView 808, although we’re told that the resolution is so high, you can crop out most of an image and zoom in to still get a fantastic close-up – the phone’s huge sensor effectively provides such detail that you have a 4x zoom.
Nokia’s PureView 808 will launch in May and will be priced at €480, or around £470.
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