A new Nokia smartphone fuses together shots taken simultaneously by five rear cameras to offer owners what it says is “the richest image capture possible”.
This lets it preserve details in the highlights and shadows that would otherwise be lost as well as giving more control over depth-of-focus edits than rival devices, it claims.
It can also produce photos with up to 240-megapixel resolution.
Experts, however, warn that it may be a challenging device to market.
“Most store sales people are not that well trained when it comes to explaining the differences between one smartphone camera system and another,” explained Francisco Jeronimo from market research firm IDC.
“But this is not just about selling this device.
“It’s about building awareness for the brand by bringing innovation to the portfolio. And it may act as a halo product that drives sales of the firm’s other mid-range phones, which are its focus.”
Although labelled as Nokia, the handsets are made by HMD Global – a Finnish start-up that has been in business since 2016.
The company had a 3.3% market share in the UK in the last three months of 2018 – according to IDC – making it the fourth bestselling brand after Apple, Samsung and Huawei.
The Nokia 9 PureView was unveiled ahead of the start of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona and is priced at $699 (£536).
The Nokia 9’s five cameras are each 12 megapixels and are complemented by an infrared sensor for depth readings.
Two cameras use a red-green-and-blue (RGB) sensor to capture colour. The other three are monochrome, allowing them to capture nearly three times as much light as there is no need to filter it for the different wavelengths.
Depending on the lighting conditions, the cameras are triggered up to four times in quick succession.
The device then selects one of the colour shots to act as the primary image, and adds detail taken from the other stills.
HMD boasts that by doing this the device can preserve detail within 12.4 stops of dynamic range – a sensitivity measurement where each stop represents a doubling of the brightness level from just-above black to just-below blown-out white.
This still falls short of many dedicated digital cameras, but is a “significantly wider range than any other smartphone out there,” according to HMD.
The advantage to owners is that they have more control when editing the exposure of the resulting Raw files because more of the information in the highlights and dimmest parts should have been preserved.
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Source: BBC