After making its debut at Mobile World Congress in Spain this week, Nokia’s new 5-camera smartphone will be available in the United States in a few days.
The Nokia 9 PureView will be available from retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H starting March 3rd.
While the phone has a list price of $700, you’ll be able to pick one up for $100 off if you place your order between March 3rd and 10th.
The smartphone’s hallmark feature is its rear camera system which consists of two color cameras and three monochrome cameras. They all have 12MP image sensors and all snap photos simultaneously, allowing you to use data from each camera to create a single high-quality image.
There’s also support for RAW image capture, native black and white photography, 4K HDR video recording, and other advanced camera tricks.
HMD Global partnered with Light to produce the camera system and while it’s likely that we’ll see more smartphones with 5 or more cameras in the future, the Nokia 9 PureView is first to market.
The rear cameras aren’t the phone’s only selling points. It also features a 2880 x 1440 pixel pOLED display, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage, support for wireless charging, and an in-screen fingerprint sensor.
The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and features a 3,220 mAh battery and a USB Type-C port.
I have a Nokia 6.1 and love it! Android One updates (currently on Pie, February security update) are great! I think Nokia dropped the headphone jack on the 9 which is a bummer. I am curious to see if all the cameras is just a gimmick or if it really makes a difference. If they have all that room for cameras you think they could find room of a headphone jack!
Quite a rational thought process there.
Unfortunately it’s not likely to have a good camera experience, maybe “good” but nothing truly worth mentioning. Just like how a Big Battery is central to getting really good battery life, a Large Lens is central to getting really good photos. Sure there are other factors, but these are the main ones. And having 2-15 Cameras won’t give you a better photo if they are small cameras, but having ONE camera that’s larger will.
I think a good/happy medium is to have a Wide Angle Lens (135′) with OIS on a very large lens (1/2″ or better). Have one on one side of the phone, and the other on the other side (eg 80mm Pupillary Distance). And yes it will fit in the frame of a phone that is 8mm’s thick. Now use the new RAM and Processing tricks of modern, to take a single great quality RAW photo. Or use both cameras to achieve a much better Bokeh, 3D, AR, and VR imagery. Or use the two distant rear cameras, combined with two distant front cameras, and achieve a 360′ videography.
A much better solution than Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus….
I should point out astronomers now use multiple big telescopes to gather extra light, so the technique is not completely bogus. Having mono and colour cameras is also a technique used in many inspection systems because intensity information tends to be higher resolution and it is degraded in the deBayering step.
Yet, the most successful telescopes, binoculars, and microscopes use large sensors/lenses and don’t generally use multiple lenses to increase quality.
While the technique can work, it’s usually not much. Not to mention that the use cases where it has been most successful are in immobile settings. Here, when talking about phones we are talking about a device of compromises (price, thickness, power draw, weight, size, heat, etc etc).
So it makes less and less sense to waste this space for minimal gains. Say if I asked you, would you prefer the OnePlus 7 with QuadCameras and a 3,600mAh battery ($350 BoM). Or would you prefer it to have a SoloCamera like the Pixel 3XL, but now it has a headphone jack, and a 5,000mAh battery ($300 BoM).
Because that’s the real price you’re paying for the design/marketing choices.