Nokia Lumia 1020 Unveiled with 41MP PureView camera

By Alex Angove

Last updated 12 July 2013

After months of speculation on the topic, the Nokia Lumia 1020 with its world-beating 41MP camera has finally been unveiled.

Much like the Galaxy Zoom, the Lumia 1020 is very much a camera first and a smartphone second. This soon becomes clear with the impressive photo functionality that Nokia has developed, delivering far more than just massive photos that are jammed packed full of pixels.

The camera

The camera on the 1020 mixes the incredibly detailed pictures of the 808, while offering the low-light capabilities of the 920.

It introduces a lot of firsts for the smartphone market. For one, it comes rocking a 1/1.5” sensor that is 5x larger than those found on traditional smartphones. It uses a six-lens system: five high performance plastic with one high precision glass element.

The Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) is a second generation system, seeing upgrades from the Lumia 920. This should allow for smoother shots even if you’re a shaky-handed shooter.

The photos

The most intriguing part of the 1020 is how it takes photos. PureView technology can use multiple pixels and can generate them in to a ‘superpixel’. This allows for much more accurate color capture, as well as a much better photo even when shooting at a lower MP setting.

This is especially great for the 1020, because it actually takes two photos at once, instead of just one. Whether in 16:9 or 4:3, the 1020 will take a 34MP or 38MP shot (respectively) and simultaneously generates a 5MP image for sharing/messaging/emailing etc. This 5MP image has the potential to outshine other 5MP shots, as every pixel is actually meaningful, rather than excess baggage.

Zooming

Obviously the 1020 has killer digital zoom. What’s impressive is that even if you take a zoomed-in shot, the 1020 will keep the whole picture is if you weren’t zoomed at all.

The standard image view will be the zoomed-in shot, as will the 5MP copy, but you have the option of zooming out and potentially back in to another part of the overall scene and generating another 5MP image if you want. By all accounts the zoom works fantastically and we can’t wait to try it out.

The rest of it

The Lumia 1020 comes running WP8 on a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor. It boasts 2GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. Interestingly, Nokia failed to include a MicroSD slot for expandable storage. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as we’ll soon explain the 1020 stores pictures in a very unusual way, using a method that sounds like it requires a very large amount of hard drive space.

The ClearBlack 4.5 inch AMOLED display rocks a 768x1280 resolution. The 1020 also rocks the classice Lumia polycarbonate design and will be available in matte white, black and bright yellow.

Overall the phone-side of things sounds passable, but not amazing. Normally we’de be disappointed with this, but this isn’t a regular smartphone; this is a camera with a phone in it.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 1020 looks like an impressive phone but we’re not entirely sure how much of a crowd it’ll pull. It should go over very well with the camera-centric buyers, but a mid-specced smartphone that’s this expensive and bulky might not go over too well.

Still, we think Nokia’s done the right thing here by going all-out. Samsung did something similar with the Galaxy Zoom but, purely on paper, we much prefer the look and functionality of the Lumia 1020.