Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Phones Were Fun – Nokia 808 PureView / Nokia Lumia 1020 (2013)”.
This video is sponsored by frame IO elements of my life, pixel pinned for posterity and digital albums, nearly a decade old, a roommate’s pets. Long since passed of Old Friends. Long since moved away of trade shows that look the same, even though their attendees do not. I captured these moments with a special smartphone one of two that proved to the world that phone cameras could finally be taken seriously.
Oh, my dear God, are you doing it yeah? This picture is awesome. Oh my God. Just a few years later, the mobile brand that made these devices would be dissolved. The platforms upon which they ran would be deprecated, but the photographic Legacy they left would persist to this very day. I’M Michael Fisher, the year is 2013, and these are the pureview phones.
Unless you think I’m rewriting history, let me be clear: by 2013, the go-to camera for most people already was their phone sales of point-and-shoot cameras had peaked about five years prior and were rapidly declining under the assault of Brands, like apple which by 2013, was up to The iPhone 5 5S Samsung, which launched the Galaxy S4 that spring and HTC with its One M7, their cameras, had macro modes, HDR capabilities and in the case of Samsung, roughly a thousand custom software features. Mainstream phone cameras were definitely a thing yet I’ll always remember. Waking up that morning, in February 2012, in Boston, rolling over loading up a tech blog and instantly wishing. I were with my then colleagues at pocket now for that Year’s Mobile World Congress, because the first thing I saw was a Hands-On video featuring a phone with a spec that just had to be a typo into a world where Samsung was bragging about its 13 megapixel Camera that the iPhone made do with 8 and HTC settled for 4 megapixels Nokia had just launched a 41 megapixel monster five years in the making.
The raison d’etre of the Nokia 808 pureview was that colossal camera and boy did. Everything else feel the sting of its long development time, even though Nokia had committed to Windows Phone 7 over a year prior, the 808 shipped with the company is well liked, but now obsolete Symbian operating system. Its display was a 4-inch AMOLED, as small as the iPhones and much less sharp at a grainy 360×640 resolution from its odd slide to lock switch to its Hefty 168 grams and borderline comical 18 millimeter bulge, even in 2012.. This was a throwback to an earlier time, and you know what none of it mattered, because that camera was in a class of its own at the time, and it’s weird to be covering a phone in this series that I’m old enough to have reviewed.
While it was still on sale, we would always caution people not to buy a camera based on resolution, because everyone seemed to think that all that mattered was megapixels when in reality, of course, there are a lot of factors that go into making a good camera anyway. There was so much resolution in this phone that well megapixels mattered. A lot keep in mind. There were no telephoto cameras in phones at the time.
So if you wanted to zoom in now, let’s just meant you were digitally cropping the image and losing precious pixels with each pinch. Well with a sensor that could kick out up to 38 megapixel images. There was so much information in the 808s pictures that you could pinch to zoom and just keep on pinching. It was the first time we saw a phone get close to the zoom that a point-and-shoot could offer without resorting to basically bolting a phone onto a camera.
Like Samsung was doing, and even without the zoom, the quality of the 808s photos were just on another level entirely. The large sensor size lent photos a shallow depth of field. You just didn’t get from other phones at the time, and there was even an ND filter built in something most modern phones still don’t have. Even the 808s flash was special instead of a weak, LED spotlight, a proper Xenon unit powered by a capacitor, so big that it was directly responsible for much of the phone’s legendary thickness. Everything on this device took a back seat to that camera to nobody was going to pay 699 dollars to switch to a burning platform. Just for the pictures and Nokia knew that, which is why it was already pivoting to an ecosystem that at the time, was on its ascendance, ah Windows Phone.
Second, only to Palms webos, it’s the platform. I miss the most the one whose demise dumped us into the dull duopoly, that is, our current iPhone or Android existence someday I’ll. Do a full episode on this ill-fated OS. But back in June 2013 Windows phone was a growing platform with design as modern as symbians was stagnant. It was also on phones offered by all the major U.S carriers, and it boasted an App Store that by the end of the year, would count 200 000 available titles for a while. There Microsoft was really making a go of it, and so nalkia did the only thing that made sense.
It brought the pureview name and camera to a more modern, more affordable and optionally, more yellow smartphone. That first bore the name: Nokia 909 – the phone we now know as the Lumia 1020 had so much potential that it got me at the time of freshly minted managing editor at pocket now to renew my contract with at T for two years. Just so, I could spend a then steep 300 bucks for the privilege. You remember when 300 phones were expensive worth every red Cent.
Akia didn’t just slap the 808s camera onto a Windows Phone. It re-engineered the camera with backside illumination to give it equivalent low light performance. Despite its slightly smaller sensor size, it put that sensor behind a more sophisticated six element, Carl Zeiss lens with a wider aperture. It used a smaller flash capacitor to file down the thickness a bit. It mounted the whole assembly on ball bearings and micro Motors to give it the optical stabilization that the 808 lacked the ND filter, didn’t make the jump, ditto, the custom, graphics, processor and, as a result, the 1020 was infamously sluggish at saving photos with a shot to Shot time of about 4 seconds but on the whole, the end result was an incredibly capable shooter that would top almost all the best camera phone lists of 2013.. If you’re thinking, that’s an awful lot of praise to Heap on a phone whose defining feature is really good, zoom. Well that wasn’t the real Legacy of pureview, see with all those pixels available on its huge sensored, the Lumia was able to over sample data. In other words, every pixel of a photo that it captured in automatic mode was actually a composite using information from up to seven pixels surrounding it.
The extra data increased sharpness, decreased noise and, after that, four second processing lag spit out. A 5 megapixel photo whose quality went far beyond what you could achieve with a traditional 5 megapixel camera. While we used the term differently today, this was the first time a lot of people started talking about computational photography as it applies to mobile. If you want to learn more about that, and the Italian Renaissance check out my buddy David ml’s, video I’ll link it below if my first camera phone, the old Samsung A600 is what made me first entertain the notion of phone photography and the Nokia n95 is what Made me start to take it seriously.
The Lumia 1020 is the phone that made me fall in love with it. Nokia software was so accessible, so easy. It gave you professional controls, but you didn’t need to be a pro to operate it effectively. It removed any excuse.
I had not to try my best and overnight the attitude of oh, it’s just a phone camera became obsolete. While I carried it, I used the 1020 to capture some of my favorite memories from my years in Boston, and I used it for work to shoot blog post header images long after my need for novelty had driven me to newer shinier devices. Even today, you can find updated comparisons from the legendary Steve Lichfield, pitting the 1020 against DSLR cameras, and the results only reinforce how revolutionary this phone was. Oh and we haven’t even gotten to talk about the bonuses.
The Windows Phone offered these what it called lenses. They were essentially apps that would change the functionality of the camera and give it more features, features that are still being touted as new. Today, Google, for example, loves advertising, Magic, Eraser and action pan and long exposure modes on its pixel phones and Motorola has treated cinemagraphs. Like they’re a new thing for the past five years or so well, it may have been rudimentary, but all this stuff was offered almost a decade ago on Windows, phones and while I’m raiding the pocket now archives, I might as well mention that excellent physical bonus Nokia Also offered for 79, the camera grip.
I loved everything about this thing from its big shutter button to its tripod mount to the extra battery. I always needed, because the 1020 was no endurance champ, the Lumia 1020 did last. In another sense, it was the best camera phone Windows ever got since its planned Lumia 1030 follow-on code name McLaren was canceled before release and Windows phone itself followed not long. After today, labels like Leica, invoke the 1020s iconic image when they want to remind you that the phone they’re offering is a camera-centric one. The intuitive manual controls that Nokia pioneered have been copied by countless manufacturers and companies do keep pushing the limits on Hardware Sony, with its one inch type camera sensor, Samsung with a Goliath, 200 megapixel camera that just broke cover.
As this video was going to the server. I can’t wait to use the phone that that camera launches on to ride the wave of giddy nerdy enthusiasm that can only come with a monster, spec bump and the possibility that well, maybe I’ll, be able to capture new memories in an entirely different way. But you know specs like that, seem to matter less than ever when I took a walk around Brooklyn, putting the nokias against the pixel 7 Pro and iPhone 14 pro well, I know which photos.
I prefer no not saying I’m surprised and I’m also not saying that modern phones win at everything. Indeed, I know there are some out there who will always consider computational photography to be blasphemy, but for the kind of from the hip shooting that most people expect their smartphones to excel at well. Nokia’S pureview phones might have started the trend with Hardware excellence, but their most potent contribution to photography was computational.
By definition, I mean just think about it. These days you can shoot in prores a professional video Codec on your iPhone. You can use an app like filmic Pro to get full manual controls very similar to what Nokia first gave us on the Lumia, and you can instantly upload share and start editing that footage with frame IO. Today’S sponsor, you may have heard me mention frame IO in Prior videos because I’ve been using them for years to coordinate with my video editors remotely it’s designed by video creators for video creators and it’s an indispensable tool in my workflow, but just as valuable as their App is their Blog, the frame i o Insider, it’s jam-packed with articles, videos and other stuff, you’ll, probably dig if you’ve enjoyed this episode or if you’ve ever wanted to create videos of your own in a good fit for a series about Nostalgia. I really enjoyed their post about how to Fascinate an audience by playing with time beyond that, you can learn about how Celluloid filmmakers are adapting to cell phone videography.
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There are a lot of them down there. You can still read all the old Lumia coverage at pocketnow and be sure to also check out Steve, Litchfield and Ray flanford’s excellent analysis at all about Windows, phone and all about Symbian. Very special thanks to Brad Mullen for Lending the 808 pureview used in this article. Without which would not have been possible folks, as always, the manufacturers you see featured in these videos, have no creative input whatsoever into the final content that includes editorial notes, copy approval, even an early look if anybody at Microsoft or Nokia is watching this they’re, seeing it For the first time, right alongside you until next time from Michael Fisher, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .