With five 12-megapixel cameras with the same focal length, Nokia 9 PureView adopts a unique multi-camera solution.
Photography is one of the current focuses of competition among mobile phone manufacturers. From outsole sensors and variable apertures to multi-camera designs and computational photography based on complex algorithms, mobile phone manufacturers are far more advanced than traditional The speed of evolution of the camera industry continues to refresh the boundaries of mobile phone photography.
However, mobile phone manufacturers did not start paying attention to photography in the past two or three years. As early as 2012, Nokia released the 808 PureView equipped with a 1/1.2-inch, native 41-megapixel sensor. Later, in the Lumia era, Nokia and Microsoft also released models with excellent camera performance such as Lumia 1020 and Lumia 950/950 XL.
HMD is naturally well aware of the "excellent tradition" of Nokia mobile phones in taking pictures. In the past year or so, HMD first re-established strategic cooperation with Zeiss, Nokia's "little partner" in mobile phones, and then obtained the PureView brand authorization from Microsoft.
After a long period of preparation, HMD has finally recently launched the "new Nokia", the first mobile phone with the PureView label equipped with the Nokia 9 PureView with five rear cameras. Let's take a look.
A flagship phone that arrived later
Before talking about the Nokia 9 PureView camera, let’s take a moment to look at the phone itself.
Nokia 9 PureView is equipped with a 5.99-inch OLED screen, the panel is from LG Display, the aspect ratio is 18:9, and the resolution is 2880X1440.
Among mobile phones using LG pOLED panels, the Nokia 9 PureView's screen is very good, but it is still far from the industry's best high-resolution Samsung flexible AMOLED panel. Thanks to the 2K resolution, Nokia 9 PureView has certain advantages in screen fineness compared to most domestic mid-to-high-end mobile phones that use FHD+.
Nokia 9 PureView is also equipped with an optical screen fingerprint. This is also Nokia’s first screen fingerprint phone. The recognition stability is good, but the absolute speed is not particularly fast. After successful recognition, the linear motor will Produces comfortable vibration feedback.
For the middle frame, Nokia 9 PureView is made of common 6000 series aluminum alloy, with two circles of bright metal chamfers cut by CNC on both sides of the middle frame.
At the bottom of the fuselage, you can see the USB-C interface and external speakers. The whole machine supports IP67 dustproof and waterproof. The Nokia 9 PureView does not come with a 3.5mm headphone jack, but it comes with USB-C headphones and a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter.
The back cover of Nokia 9 PureView uses curved heat-bent glass, and above it is a bump-free "shower style" camera module, including 5 cameras, 1 laser focus module and 1 flash .
The phone we have is the international version. You can see the Android One logo at the bottom of the back cover. The Chinese version that will be launched later will be equipped with a system based on native Android and lightly customized for domestic users. , there will not be this mark.
It is worth mentioning that although the size of the whole machine is not small, the Nokia 9 PureView weighs only 173 grams, which is relatively light among recently released flagship machines.
In terms of configuration, due to the long product development cycle, Nokia 9 PureView does not use the latest Snapdragon 855 platform. Of course, the performance of "Snapdragon 845+6GB+128GB" will not be displayed at all now. I feel like I am not keeping up with the times.
Because the rear camera module takes up a lot of internal space, the battery of the Nokia 9 PureView is not large, at 3320 mAh, and supports 18W wired fast charging and wireless charging. In our experience, as long as we do not take a lot of photos (the battery drains out quickly when taking photos), the battery life of the Nokia 9 PureView is still trustworthy, and it is not a big problem to last a day with moderate use.
How is the effect of the five rear cameras?
Multi-camera design has become the choice of all flagship mobile phones except Pixel. Dual-camera, three-camera, or even four-camera are no longer uncommon. However, most of the current multi-camera solutions for mid-to-high-end mobile phones are based on The principle of multi-focal length is that in addition to the conventional wide-angle head, additional ultra-wide-angle and medium-telephoto heads are added to achieve wider focal length coverage. The main daily imaging still relies on a single main camera.
Nokia 9 PureView is completely different. It is equipped with 5 cameras with the same focal length, all designed to improve image quality.
Specifically, these five cameras on Nokia 9 PureView all use Sony IMX386 sensors (1/2.8 inches, 12 million pixels, 1.25 micron single pixel), and the lenses are all 6P, F1.8 aperture , the lens has passed Zeiss certification.
The one in the middle is the color main camera, which is used for core imaging. The one below the main camera is the color secondary camera, and the remaining three arranged in a triangle are all black and white lenses. When taking a photo, these five lenses collect data simultaneously, and then synthesize and output a 12-megapixel photo with a maximum latitude of 12.4 stops.
In addition to ordinary JPEG direct output, Nokia9 PureView can also output uncompressed RAW (DNG) files. After shooting, users can directly use Adobe Lightroom on their mobile phone to post-process the photos.
Since the current ISP of Snapdragon SoC cannot achieve simultaneous shooting of five cameras, Nokia 9 PureView is also equipped with a co-processor from Light internally to assist in shooting and post-compositing.
In fact, the 5-camera solution of Nokia 9 PureView was jointly developed by HMD, Light and Google. Prior to this, Light had launched an L16 camera with 16 built-in cameras. The Nokia 9 PureView solution can be regarded as the "mobile version" of the L16 designed by HMD.
After talking about the hardware, let’s look at the actual results. (The following photos were all taken in automatic mode using Nokia 9 PureView, without any post-production, jpeg output directly)
2x focal length
It can be seen that with the support of 5 cameras, Nokia 9 PureView indeed delivers imaging quality that is comparable to the industry's top standards, with high tolerance and excellent resolution.
In addition, the imaging style of Nokia 9 PureView is obviously different from that of mainstream mobile phones. The colors are lighter and there is no large-scale post-sharpening and noise reduction common on mobile phones. The disadvantage of this is that it directly Posting to Weibo Moments on a mobile phone may not be so "eye-catching", but the advantage is that the photos have more room for post-production (you can also see the user positioning of Nokia 9 PureView here).
In addition to the normal mode, since Nokia 9 PureView contains three black and white lenses, it can also directly output higher quality black and white photos "natively". The sample is as follows (black and white mode, no post-processing, jpeg straight out) .
2x focal length
2x focal length
Finally, we need to specifically mention the compositing problem of Nokia 9 PureView.
It may be that the coprocessor provided by Light has a performance bottleneck, or the synthesis algorithm of Nokia 9 PureView is too complex. After users take photos with Nokia 9 PureView, it still takes six or seven seconds to synthesize. , and then you can see the taken photos. If you save the depth map (you can simulate blurring in the later stage), this process will be extended to about ten seconds.
HMD should also be aware of this problem, so it chose to put the synthesis process completely in the background without affecting the shooting in the foreground. During background compositing, users can still continue shooting at a rate of almost 1 frame per second.
A special "muscle-showing" product
HMD has said that the Nokia 9 PureView will be sold in China in the near future, and the price is unknown. Considering that the cost of this phone should be quite considerable (5 camera modules plus a long research and development cycle), we speculate that the price of the Nokia 9 PureView should be difficult to compare with the Nokia flagship phone at this time last year, which was priced at 4,699 yuan. 8 Sirocco Low.
If you are a very professional mobile phone camera user, you hope that your mobile phone can provide excellent image quality and sufficient post-production space. The Nokia 9 PureView with excellent image quality and DNG support is a very special and very useful camera. The choice of strength.
However, for HMD, the greater value of this Snapdragon 845 flagship machine equipped with Zeiss five cameras may be to "show off muscles". On the Nokia 9 PureView, HMD proved that the "new Nokia" is also capable of making industry-leading cameras and has the strength to make excellent flagship phones.
We also look forward to HMD speeding up the pace of research and development in the future, so that flagship phones can arrive faster and more "timely".