It's not about the camera, it's about presenting Nokia as a producer of a premium phone, so that other versions of Nokia look better in comparison. No one cares about Windows Phone, but when Nokia makes headlines for 41-megapixels, the general populace that doesn't really get that they don't need 41-megapixels will nevertheless notice, and think 'wow, that is a lot, does my iPhone have that?'.
99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.
I do believe Nokia has been very clear that the high megapixels is meant to be used as supersampling to reduce noise in normal sized pictures. They are after all targeting the enthusiast photographer who likes to (believe he) understands how camera's work.
Also, from an engineering point of view it's pretty neat: if the idea is to downsize the final picture to 5 mp, while using cropping on the pre-downsampled image to zoom, that means you can focus on having a high optical resolution in the centre of a fixed focal lens, and worry less about the edges. That has lots of advantages: a fixed focal lens is less complicated than a zoom lens, which has the side effect of making it easier to keep the lense flat,and getting a higher optical resolution in the centre is easier to do from an optics standpoint.
Nokia's really screwing up the messaging on this, as people are fixating on the megapixel count
HTC has been trying to push the message you suggest with the camera on the HTC One, and while the One is a great device and (I think) doing well for HTC, no one is really talking about their camera -- even though it is a superior camera to most other phones. Megapixels are like Clock Speed was a decade ago: there are more important stats to look at, but consumers just see the one number.
I'm not making any judgement, I'm just saying the point of 41 megapixels isn't to give consumers a huge picture, it's to give them a reason to buy the phone.
What HTC did do a good job of was branding their pixels as "Ultrapixels". I see that branding used on all the major tech blogs when mentioning the HTC One's camera.
Nokia's making the mistake of pushing a camera with specs that isn't easily understood by many people, and from the looks of it, that seems to include people who consider themselves photographers.
I tend to think that the 41 megapixel count will turn off many prospective buyers ("Why the hell do I need so many megapixels?").
41 megapixels can't be nice on a crappy sensor and lenses system. 41 megapixels would be interesting on a real camera unless someone wants to print oversampled stuff.
You don't need to print to see the improvements the oversampled images provide. You should see much cleaner images, especially in low light. These are noticeable even at Facebook level resolutions. Anyone who has used a real camera would know that.
There's completely no point in such sensor if lens are not providing equally high resolution image too. Unless you're into shooting Airy disks (though, I don't think the phone will provide raw sensor data).
That is, the whole 41MP thing is, mostly, PR bullshit.
Well, this camera's spiritual predecessor, the 808 seemed to shoot high megapixel images just fine. The Verge's 100% crops of the 34MP images look fine to me.
>99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.
The tech does make normal pictures look better because of the oversampling. Not to mention optical image stabilization for reducing blur and shake in both image and video.
99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.