Nokia is currently the king of the hill for smart phone photography with the 41MP equipped Nokia Lumia 1020 and the recently announced Lumia 1520 that comes with a 20.7MP PureView camera. From our recent photo comparison, we’ve seen how spectacular its large sensor coupled with resampling feature can do but so far all images are saved in a combination of high-res 38MP and a smaller 5MP jpeg image.
During today’s Nokia World event, it was announced that both Lumia 1020 and 1520 flagship device will soon get uncompressed RAW image support which allows greater control for photography enthusiasts for further tweaking. On the downside, a typical RAW file would be a multiple times bigger in file size and that could be a problem on a Lumia 1020 which is limited to 32GB of storage without any expandable memory slot. Nevertheless, the option of having RAW format opens up new possibilities from its huge 1/1.5″ sensor. So far there’s no mention when will this be rolling out to existing Lumia 1020 users.
Another interesting feature that was introduced is the Nokia Refocus app. The app lets you refocus on different subjects after the picture is taken. This is said to be based on Pelican Imaging technology, which emulates multiple cameras from a single sensor, imagine the eyes of a fly. With software processing, this allows better control which can be seen in this demo video. In the mean time, you can check out the Nokia Refocus feature in action yourself over here.
At the same time, it is good to know that Nokia Pro Cam & Nokia Smart Cam apps are now combined as a single app known simply as Nokia Camera.
