The New Nokia Lumia 1020: Bags a whooping 41Megapixel Camera

Nokia unveiled its Lumia 1020 at a press conference today in New York. The handset boasts of a powerful 41-megapixel camera that’s packed with exciting features. The Nokia Lumia 1020 is all about the Camera, this Windows 8 device has an enormous image resolution and should actually be called the real ‘CameraPhone’.

Nokia pairs an ultralarge camera sensor with the Nokia PureView image processing software, finally bringing the smartphone we hoped the Lumia 920 and its many variants would be. The Camera has a 6-lens Carl Zeiss optics (like the recently-unveiled Lumia 925), which also takes on wide angles. There’s high resolution 3x zoom, autofocus (manual focus also available), and a dual flash system. A smaller LED flash complements the larger Xenon flash and the entire shooter captures 1080p HD video at a rate of 30 frames per second.

Ball bearings surrounding the lens promise image stabilization, which CEO Stephen Elop demonstrated on stage with photos he took on a wobbly boat. It is suspected that ball bearings replaced the stabilizing springs found in the Lumia 920 to conserve space and keep the camera mount profile as low as possible.

Nokia has also made successes on its low light photos. Nokia’s Pro Camera settings boast controls that let shutterbugs and serious photographers easily navigate their options on the 41-megapixel device, including manual exposure settings and long exposure times. The camera app also includes a tutorial, which sounds helpful for newbies to learn how to use their high-octane phone.

41-megapixels amounts to a lot of captured information, more than most people can and will really use, but as with the Symbian-birthed Nokia 808 PureView, the Lumia 1020’s higher megapixel count translates into a 5-megapixel image with lossless zooming for higher quality cropped photos. In the Lumia 1020, Nokia is also extending this “oversampling” method to video as well, which could mean some really high-fidelity HD captures when you zoom in. It isn’t just about images with Nokia. Audio technology that Nokia calls “rich recording” promises to capture clear, distortion-free sound even in loud surroundings.

Specification and Design
The matte white, black, or yellow Lumia 1020 is more than just a camera. Aside from the large, round shooter module, it really looks a lot like the Lumia 920 phone, both in terms of the squared corners and rounded spines. There are a few differences though between the two phones, the phone certainly impressed with its build quality and premium feel. Like its predecessor, the 1020’s chassis is a unibody piece molded from high-quality polycarbonate. It also spots similar smoothly rounded edges and a slightly curved back side, making it comfortable to hold.

Despite its huge camera, the Lumia 1020 is slightly thinner and lighter than the Lumia 920. That’s no mean feat considering the enormous camera. The back of the 1020 also uses a soft-touch coating that feels less slippery than the 920’s often-glossy back surface. The screen on this 4G LTE smartphone has the same familiar 4.5-inch AMOLED PureMotion HD+ display with a 1280×768 HD display and a 16:9 aspect ratio. Nokia’s Clear Black filter lies on top for cutting down outdoor glare. As with the new guard of Lumia phones, this 1020 has an ultrasensitive touch screen that you can operate with your fingernail or gloves hand.

Above the display, it has a 1.2-megapixel wide angle front-facing camera ready to capture shots and HD video. The 1020 runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, and has 32GB of internal memory, supplemented by 7GB of SkyDrive cloud storage, courtesy of Microsoft. The phone is sealed in typical high-end Lumia fashion, so there’s no expandable memory, though 32GB is a healthy helping.