With references to the future, flying cars and rabbits out of the proverbial hat, this is a great (though long) read from Ntutu Letseka, a veritable essay on what makes the Nokia 808 PureView special, ending with a truck load of example photos, crops and zooms. An essential read for the tech fan over your lunchtime snack today.
From the article:
But nothing could have prepared me for the Nokia 808 PureView, quite literally my flying car moment. I remember thinking through the live stream, as the details of the device and its camera were revealed, “They did not just do that”. But they did, and it was absolutely bonkers. I was fully in the camp of the skeptics. There had to be some trickery, some kind of sorcery. Then the white paper was released and it all made so much sense. It was clear that Nokia had just pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
A few thousand words of enthusiastic text later, Ntutu Letseka tempers the prose with a heavy qualification that will ring bells with most of us:
While I said this was not a review as such, I will offer up my brief conclusion of how I see the 808 PureView as a complete smartphone. While I am perfectly happy with Symbian and rather deft at dealing with its nuances I can appreciate that it is something of a relic today. Sales will continue as the mobile world transitions, nothing disappears immediately but it is on its way out. The 808 PureView is surely the last of the greats, and what a way to go out, what a bang! Having said that I don’t think I could have recommended this device to anyone I know, whether for straight up cash or on a contract. A few people have asked me for advice on smartphone purchases since the 808 has been released and the sum total I have recommended this device to is zero. The price tag of this device makes it difficult to sell itself as just a camera, so one really has to harness it as a smartphone and from that respect there are just too many caveats.
Though most of his images stood out, here's one that caught my eye, embedded below. Nice macro, eh? Nope. This is a 0.5MP crop from a 38MP image that's (literally) over seventy times larger. This is 1/70th of the 808-shot image. Unbe-flipping-lievable......
