Launched this spring, the Nokia 9 PureView drew immediate attention thanks to its unique five-camera main-camera design. Jointly developed with Silicon Valley imaging startup Light, and in cooperation with SoC vendor Qualcomm, the multi-camera module is strikingly different from others on the market. For starters, all five cameras are active all the time, and three of them capture monochrome images. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC and a custom-designed co-processor combine the images for the final result. Effects like Bokeh are assisted through a sixth sensor that measures distance using Time of Flight. Video, however, uses only one of the five cameras.
Nokia Smart Camera and Pro Camera to combine into one as Nokia Camera
The Nokia 9 is capable of either using multiple camera modules with the same exposure to enhance detail or with varied exposures for improved dynamic range. By default, it chooses its specific mode automatically based on the scene and light levels. Nokia also claims that the Time of Flight sensor makes it possible to estimate depth accurately from as close as seven centimeters to a far distance of 40 meters, allowing for the capture of precise depth data for the simulated bokeh mode.
For video, only one of the five cameras is used, so video results would be expected to track similarly to other, conventionally-designed, cameras. Except for a solid score of 87 in Stabilization, though, the Nokia 9 put in a weak performance in all the other Video categories compared to other current model premium phones, delivering a Video score of 80.
The camera is fairly consistent about slightly under-exposing in most target lighting conditions, ranging between 75% and 90% of correct exposure from 10 to 1000 lux. In daylight it is consistent at just about 90%. It also does a reasonable job of proper exposure in high-contrast scenes, but colors are under-saturated in the dark portions of the image compared to other contemporary phones like the P30 Pro and Galaxy S10 Plus. There is also substantial loss of detail in the bright areas of the image compared to the P30 Pro. You can see this in our under bridge test scene below.
Long before the iPhone or Galaxy or Pixel arrived, if you wanted the best camera you looked to Nokia to deliver. Remember the then cutting-edge 5-megapixel camera on the Nokia N95? Or how about the Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 1020 and its insane 41-megapixel PureView camera?
Furthermore, the camera can also shoot in RAW format and spit out DNG files, which range anywhere between 28-30MB, with less noise and more dynamic range compared to processed JPEGs. RAW format photos are way larger than JPEGs, but because there's so much data to work with, you can really recover a lot of stuff like highlights and shadows during post.
That said, the phone was running on pre-production software, so what I saw might not be representative of the consumer release. In fact, HMD tells me they're still tweaking the software and the final build should be much quicker for image processing. Let's hope so because five cameras won't mean much if you're spending all day waiting for photos to compile.
The rest of the phone looks excellent on paper. I'm not even bothered by its use of last year's Snapdragon 845 chip because HMD and Qualcomm worked together to squeeze every last drop of processing power out of it to handle the five cameras.
Instead of the soon-to-be-common wide, telephoto, and ultra-wide camera combination, the Nokia 9\u2019s five-camera array consists of two 12-megapixel color image sensors and three 12-megapixel monochromatic sensors, each with an f/1.8 aperture to collect tons of light.
By stacking the captured information from the two color cameras with the three monochrome cameras, Nokia says the Nokia 9\u2019s able to collect 10x more light than the single color camera sensors in other phones like the iPhone XS and Pixel 3. As a result, Nokia says photos taken with the phone should have even more dynamic range.
But sharper photos isn\u2019t the only upside to having five cameras. The combined camera sensors can also create extra high-resolution depth maps, capturing up to 1,200 layers of depth information, to more realistically mimic depth-of-field.\u00a0
All of this extra depth is used to create better-looking portrait photos, where the background blur (called bokeh in photography terms) more accurately resembles photos you\u2019d get from a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
And as if all of these pro-level camera features weren\u2019t already enough, there\u2019s also a native monochrome mode that captures black-and-white photos just like an SLR with black-and-white film would. Additionally, there\u2019s a \u201cPro Camera UI\u201d mode that includes the ability to shoot timelapses with exposure times of up to 10 seconds.
HMD gave me a brief demo of the Nokia 9 and the cameras (especially the maxed out depth-mapping) were mostly impressive. But the software was far from finished. The camera\u2019s quick to shoot photos, but I noticed some noticeable sluggishness waiting for the software to combine images from the five cameras into a single shot.\u00a0
Still, I\u2019m excited by the Nokia 9\u2019s potential. I\u2019m a hardcore smartphone photographer and it brings me great joy to see phone cameras only getting more advanced. While I've already replaced my mirrorless camera with my smartphone, I still need it for work. If the Nokia 9's five cameras live up to their hype, the end could be very near for \"real cameras.\"\u00a0
The rest of the phone looks excellent on paper. I'm not even bothered by its use of last year's Snapdragon 845 chip because HMD and Qualcomm worked together to squeeze every last drop of processing power out of it to handle the five cameras.\u00a0
The Nokia 9 will be available in the U.S. for $699 and 599 euros in Europe\u2014 damn affordable for a phone with five cameras if you ask me. Whether or not photographers will ditch their iPhones and Pixels for the Nokia 9 will be something I eagerly look forward to monitoring.
This far more difficult overcast outdoor shot shows a much bigger gap between the two. To see how the sensors handle exposure and dynamic range, we picked the clouds above the red tree as our focal point which revealed how much darker foreground detail the two cameras can preserve.
Oddly, HMD has opted for the Snapdragon 845 chipset for the Nokia 9, which is a bit outdated as the Snapdragon 855 is the current buzzword. Our guess is that since Nokia worked hard for a long time to optimize the camera algorithms, which use all the chip essentials - CPU, GPU, ISP, DSP - it would have been impossible to translate this work for the Snapdragon 855 samples when they became available late last year. Plus, the Nokia 9 PureView isn't that expensive, so there is that, too.
There are five 12MP cameras on the back, all sitting behind f/1.8 Zeiss lens. Two of those are RGB and the other three are monochrome. There is also a sixth camera here - a ToF one - for additional depth information. A dual-tone LED flash is the final thing you'll see at the back.
Those five camera lenses have the same fixed focal length of 28mm. You won't find an ultra-wide angle or telephoto snappers, and the Nokia 9 doesn't brag with any fancy shooting modes. The PureView was never intended to be the world's most versatile smartphone camera but to deliver brilliant image quality on par with an expensive full-blown camera. So, how does it happen?
The phone combines the images from all five 12MP cameras, sometimes even multiple frames from each of those, into a single image with a spectacular dynamic range - up to 12.4 stops of difference in light which is as much as a large sensor camera. NSo overall, the Nokia Pureview promises unmatched scene depth detection and spectacular dynamic range.
Nokia has also partnered with Google so that Google's Photos app could natively understand how to support photos taken with the Nokia 9's five cameras. Google Photos will be able to adjust the focal point after taking the photo, adjust the amount of bokeh, and will be able to display the full-size RAW files - which are DNG.
Thanks to the sheer amount of camera sensors and the ToF camera, Nokia says that this setup can produce a depth map for more convincing defocusing gathering up to 1200 layers of depth data (as opposed to only 10 on most phones) for up to 40m away from the camera. This means we should see much more realistic bokeh in photos, the blur would gradually be stronger the further that part of the scene is from the camera. The depth info is stored within the photo and Google Photos will allow you to change the amount of defocusing after the shoot.
The Nokia 9 also has a front-facing 20MP f/1.8 camera. It supports Tetracell pixel binning so in low light situations it can combine four adjacent pixels into one producing 5MP images with less noise.
Now, let's talk pricing. The Nokia 9 doesn't have the cutting-edge Snapdragon 855, probably because of the complexity of the camera and the long time it took making it, but it seems HMD has taken this into consideration - the Nokia 9 PureView is priced at $699 - noticeably cheaper than the current crop of flagships. 2ff7e9595c
Comments