Jack Wang wrote:Thanks for your clarification. 1/1.83" is amazing, any chance Nokia would put it the brochure or spec sheet for the "geekier" ones? Even Sony Exmor CMOS, currently one of the most advanced sensors, suffer from noise at low ISOs, ie, day light. Canon SX1 lacks details below ISO400 otherwise captured with its CCD counterparts SX10 and SX20, due to aggressive noise reduction. The colors are also not as "pure" in good lighting conditions, IMO. The Sony APS CMOS in my Pentax K-X performs better than CCD based Nikons at ISO800~6400, but worse at ISO200~800. Indeed, a well lit scene often turns out better in my pocket Optio A40 (1/1.7" 12MP CCD) than the DSLR. DSLRs are switching to CMOS due to lower cost, low light performance (read: day light non-performance), and crazy high speed.
It's another ball game when Sony takes the idea and runs with crazy high speed processing, such as comparing and canceling out the random noise from 6 successive shots, but let's not go there for the sake of our poor multitasking phone batteries...
I do appreciate Nokia's efforts and understand that CCD requires significant changes (physical dimensions, auxiliary processing circuitry, R&D/material cost, etc.) that we probably won't want to pay for.
I shall do more research before expressing my concerns, in hopes that you have more time building a strong product than clarifying concerns 😊
I'm copying this from the GSMArena interview I did this week, it seems appropriate given your message.
"I'd like to explain a little more in regard to noise and our handling of it as wellas our reasons behind the improved optics and large sensor.
As said, whenever you play with the output from the sensor you'll end up increasing noise. The combination of the new optics and large sensor gave us the best platform we've ever had to develop from.
Early on we were seeing some pretty incredibly detailed images and we therefore knew the optics had potential. The specs prove this too as the theoretical performance of the optics is pretty close to 12mp. Often the system resolution is way below the actual and a 12mp camera (even dedicated digital cameras) may only provide in practice say 5mp resolution.
I can't say what we'll end up with as we continue to optimise the performance we may see this figure reduce, but the point is that we have lots of resolving power to start with. Those original images whilst looked incredibly sharp suffered from what I see in many broadly comparable products and that's being over processed. The result is something that looks ok but not natural. We wanted to retain as much natural detail as possible but we also still wanted to provide vibrant colours which are true to your mind's eye but without the over processed look.
You can artificially create perceived sharpness but you can't create detail that wasn't there to start with. It's an important difference. Having the high resolving power of the Carl Zeiss optics coupled to the low noise provided by the large sensor has given us more to play with than before.
The result we're aiming for is the best balance of all of these. We could optimise for just one, e.g. to provide lower noise than ever before but then we'll have to compromise a little on the colour or we'll compromise the inherent detail. In other words, great colour but which is still natural, high detail without sharpening artefacts but still with relatively low noise.
A further example of the benefit of the Carl Zeiss optics and large sensor is in video. Because we have great resolving power to start with we don't need to have high levels of edge enhancement. And as we don't have high levels of noise we're able to record video without any noise reduction whatsoever in daylight conditions. The result is high detail in video but without any noise. It looks really great."
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