The first few hours with the Lumia 1020’s camera

Thanks to UPS shenanigans, I've only had our Lumia 1020 review unit for a few hours. I'll have a full review up in due course, but during these few hours, I've had a chance to do the thing the Lumia 1020 is really designed for: taking photographs.

I took some pictures this afternoon with the Lumia 1020, a Lumia 920, an iPhone 5, and a DSLR, my Canon 50D. For the most part, I used the default apps with the default settings (occasionally I suppressed the flash explicitly, but otherwise left it automatic). The DSLR was in programmed mode, where it picks the best combination of aperture and exposure time. It had the flash permanently disabled, as the built-in flash casts a shadow with the lens I had attached, and I didn't want the extra bulk of my external flash..

The Lumia 1020 was configured to generate two pictures each time: a full resolution image (coming out at around 33.5 MP with 16:9 framing), and a resampled 5MP image. Outdoor pictures were largely taken in the brutally harsh Houston sunlight.

I'm not entirely sure what this archaic device is for.

100 percent crops from the above:

In good light, the 1020 retains impressive detail even in its full resolution images. This lets you do two things: print billboard-sized images, and crop while still retaining a good-enough image quality. The digital zoom on the 1020 does this automatically; rather than interpolating (like the other cameras do), it just takes a 5MP crop from the full-size image. This has the repercussion that when using the digital zoom, the 5MP image and full resolution image differ—it captures the full uncropped image, rather than generate an interpolated version.

Demonstrating this, I took some pictures of a statue of Sam Houston. The conditions were pretty unpleasant: very bright sunshine, with a very dark statue. Exposing simultaneously for highlights and shadows challenged the cameras' dynamic ranges.

Digital zoom (rightfully) has its detractors, of course. It's not "real" zoom, and interpolated data is made up data. But this was a good example of why it's a useful feature nonetheless: the size of the statue meant that "zooming with my feet" wasn't possible: there simply wasn't any way to get a picture of the statue from a reasonable vantage point without using digital zoom.

Lumia 1020 full size. This shows how the image was framed, and gives a sense of what the camera cropped.

100% crops of these images show the difference in detail that the 1020 achieves, compared to the interpolated images generated by the other phones:

Like the Lumia 920 and its siblings, the Lumia 1020's lens has optical image stabilization. The system used to do this is new—it uses ball-bearings instead of springs—but the purpose is the same: hold the optical parts still, even while the rest of the camera moves around, so that the shutter can be open for longer. This lets more light in, which in turn means better low light photographs. Does it work? Does it ever.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science has some rather splendid crystals and gemstones. They're shown off in a darkened gallery.

The iPhone 5 just gave up here. It couldn't find the focus, and combined with the relatively long shutter time it picked (1/15 second), the result was a blurry mess.

The Lumias fared substantially better. The 920 picked a slightly longer exposure (1/4 second) than the 1020 (1/5 second), with the result that it had a larger blown-out highlight from the reflection of the light illuminating the exhibit. The long exposure was also too long even for the stabilized lens: the crystals have much softer edges.

The DSLR, with both optical image stabilization and a 1/15 second shutter time, managed the crispest image of all. However, its color accuracy was very poor; a not altogether unusual instance of auto white balance getting things wrong. The Lumias were much more accurate in that regard. This is fixable in software like Lightroom easily enough.

This is a piece titled Gentrification of the Inner City, by two Houston artists, Wiley Robertson and Bryan Cope. The people depicted are former residents of the area who have been displaced by gentrification. There's currently a planning application to turn the site into a coffee shop.

Cats are obligatory:

Unfortunately, my feline model was rather uncooperative.

Photographs of dinner are also obligatory:

The Lumia 1020 has a xenon flash, and I think it did a reasonable job here. The Lumia 920's effort is also competent. The iPhone 5 picture has poor color accuracy and has lost detail in its lettuce.

First impressions of the Lumia 1020's camera are that Nokia has done a great job. There are more photos to take and situations to test, but so far, it's clear that the sensor can pick up a phenomenal amount of detail—at least in good light—and that the stabilized lens really lets you make the most of even dim conditions. The camera is probably the best ever to be put in a smartphone. In that regard, at least, Nokia has set the standard by which all others are measured.

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The Nokia Lumia 1020: The smartphone to render point-and-shoots obsolete

Take a Lumia 920 and slap on an AMOLED screen, and you have a Lumia 925 or 928. Take a Lumia 920 and slap on an AMOLED screen and a hulking great camera—now you have the Lumia 1020.

The Lumia 1020 is Nokia's new flagship Windows Phone. It's a mix of the familiar and the novel. Familiar are the phone's internals, sensors, and screen. There's the same dual core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 as found in the 920, 925, and 928. The same 4.5-inch 1280×768 AMOLED screen as the 925 and 928 with the same Gorilla Glass coating and "PureMotion HD+" that's supposed to reduce reflections, improve sunlight visibility, and ensure crisp 60Hz screen updates.

Enlarge / Out of the box, the Lumia 1020 has this rather handy sticker on the back that shows what everything is.

Even the design is very familiar. From most angles, it looks just like the Lumia 920. The body is seamless polycarbonate (black, white, or yellow) with a slightly curved black screen on the front. The right-hand side has a set of buttons: power, volume, and a camera button with half-press focus.

There are a few minor internal differences. The Lumia 1020 has 2GB of RAM instead of the 1GB found on the 920-series phones. It apparently contains a barometer, new to Windows Phone, in addition to the typical GPS/GLONASS, compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope. Slightly peculiarly, it eschews the built-in wireless charging support found on the 920 and 928, instead using a clip-on cover to provide wireless charging, similar to the 925.

But the point of the Lumia 1020 is the camera. If you don't care about smartphone cameras, the Lumia 1020 has nothing significant to offer above the 920 series. I don't think you'll ever notice the extra RAM or barometer.

If, however, you like taking photos with your smartphone, the Lumia 1020 is altogether more interesting.

Though the Lumia 1020 looks like a 920 in most regards, it has one striking difference: a great big bulge on the back where the camera is.

Small cameras—the kinds found in phones and point-and-shoots—have their imaging sensors measured in an honestly idiotic "inch" system that doesn't actually correspond to the size of the sensor itself. In the 1950s, the analog sensors used in TV cameras used glass tubes. These came in a wide range of diameters, and it's these diameters that are used to denote the size of the imaging sensors. However, the actual usable sensor size in these tubes was about two-thirds of the diameter.

Even though nobody uses video camera tubes any more, these smaller sensors retain the tube-based sizing policy. A sensor described as being 1/3.2", such as that found in the iPhone 5, has a diagonal not of 1 ÷ 3.2 = 0.3125 inches/7.9 mm but rather about two-thirds of that, 0.208 inches/5.28 mm. This isn't exact. The ratios vary, with the iPhone 5's sensor being about 0.233 inches/5.9 mm.

Under this historic, inaccurate, and downright anachronistic measurement system, the Lumia 1020 has a 2/3" sensor. This translates to a diagonal of about 0.444 inches/11.2 mm.

The sensor has a resolution of 7712×5360 for a total of 41.3 megapixels. The optical parts of the camera don't illuminate the corners of the sensor, however. Instead, it supports 16:9 images at 7712×4345 (33.6MP) and 4:3 images at 7136×5360 (38.2MP). Each pixel is 1.1 microns.

As is increasingly common, the sensor is back-side illuminated. Most imaging sensors use front-side illumination: like the human eye, photons have to pass through the sensor's wiring before reaching the photo diode itself. This arrangement is easier to manufacture and more physically robust, but the wires reflect some of the light falling on the sensor, reducing the low-light performance.

Back-side illumination constructs the sensor similar to that of a cephalopod eye, with the wiring behind the photo diode. This is more complex, but it allows more light capture. Apple has used back-side illuminated sensors since the iPhone 4; Nokia uses them in the 920 series' cameras, among others.

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