Meet the Nokia 9: five cameras bring a different approach to photography over the phone

HMD's Nokia brand builds another flagship smartphone and, unlike the Nokia 8 Sirocco, it arrives in the United States. HMD announces the "Nokia 9 Pureview" at the Mobile World Congress, featuring five cameras at the back.

HMD devices are generally sold in a price range with very little competition. In the US $ 400 market, Motorola is left to cope, and it can easily win most of these clashes with regular security updates and new releases of security systems. exploitation. However, this is a $ 700 smartphone, and in the world of flagship devices, HMD has a lot more competition than it was used to. Does the Nokia 9 compare to the OnePlus 6T at $ 550? Can it really be in the price range of the $ 750 Galaxy S10e? We are not so sure.

The first concern is the technical sheet. While virtually all the phones announced at the Mobile World Congress this year will use the new Snapdragon 855, the Nokia 9 uses the Snapdragon 845, a chip that is quite a year old. Using the old Snapdragon HMD, Qualcomm claims to have a 45% faster processor and a 20% faster GPU, and should be more energy efficient thanks to the transition from a 10nm manufacturing process to a faster one. 7 nm process. In the "save money" category, the OnePlus 6T will give you the same SoC for $ 150 less, in the "spend a little more" category, the Galaxy S10e has the newest Snapdragon 855 for an extra $ $ 50.

The front design is also not very competitive compared to other phones. It's not ugly or anything, but compared to something like the Galaxy S10e at the same price with its perforated camera, or the OnePlus 6T with a teardrop-shaped notch, the Nokia 9 looks like a phone from last year or even earlier. This is essentially the design of the LG V30, released in 2017. HMD provides a 599-inch 1499p OLED display in a case of 155 × 75 × 8.0 mm. The OnePlus 6T gives you a screen of 6.41 inches at the same form factor.

Other features include a built-in optical fingerprint reader at the front of the screen, just like the OnePlus 6T, 6GB RAM, 128GB UFS 2.1 storage, a battery 3320mAh, an IP67 resistance to water and dust and to a wireless charge.

Nokia's flagship smartphone also takes on some of the disadvantages of modern flagship design. The aluminum sides are good, but it has a fragile glass back panel and there is no headphone jack or MicroSD card.

Five-Lens Camera: A Material Approach to Stacking Images

So, while the Nokia 9 will not win any awards for hardware design, the camera is a remarkable feature and the phone will live or die by its photographic performance. There are many multi-camera phones, but their approach is equivalent to that of a lens kit for photographer: the Galaxy S10 has several different lenses, and you can mimic a real photographer by going from one camera to another. a normal goal to another. Wide angle telephoto lens, like on a DSRL.

The approach of HMD is different. You press the shutter button. The Nokia 9 takes a photo with every lens, the software overwrites the five photos together and generates a single, higher quality photo. This is what is called "stacking images" and it's the same technique that Google has been using on Pixel and Nexus cameras for quite some time, though it's not the same thing. with one goal.

HMD's material-oriented approach to image stacking is accompanied by interesting implementation details. You have five lenses: three 12 MP monochrome cameras and two 12 MP RGB cameras. This has never actually been done on a commercial smartphone before and for good reason. The Snapdragon 845 from Nokia 9 allows you to connect up to 7 cameras in total, but you are allowed to use only two at a time. With the Qualcomm SoC only, the fivefold HMD camera would not be possible.

The Nokia 9 camera is not only built on the camera interface of Qualcomm. HMD is associated with the Light photography company to ensure the operation of the five-camera configuration. Five cameras should be nothing for Light; the company has already built a camera with 16 lenses called the L16. For smartphones, Light has developed an imaging coprocessor called "Lux Capacitor". Although it does not allow the Is allow you to use up to six cameras simultaneously.

With the Light chipset, the Nokia 9 takes five simultaneous images (60 megapixels of data) and then mixes them into a 12 megapixel photo with dynamic range and better lighting performance than one could. get one single photo. HMD claims that the five sensors can capture "up to 10 times more light than a sensor of the same type".

This type of stacking has allowed cameras such as Google Pixel to reach new heights with features such as Night Sight, which can capture up to 15 photos in a single image. However, Google only has one camera. He stacks pictures "temporally", taking several pictures, one after the other, several times a second. The simultaneous stacking of Nokia images should have fewer problems with moving objects – something that Google had to take into account in its image processing algorithm. The Nokia 9 can also do time image stacking though, which would have five cameras shoot simultaneously multiple times. HMD indicates that it can collect up to 240 MP of data (which still amounts to 12 MP), which suggests that the five 12MP cameras take four pictures each, for a total of 20 frames.

The multi-camera solution also allows for interesting alternative camera modes. Since there are several monochrome sensors, you can take real black and white photos without using a filter. In Depth mode, you can create a "12 MP Full Depth Map" containing 1,200 different depth layers. All this is grouped into Google's "GDepth" depth map format and loaded into Google Photos, where you can adjust the depth of field and add days, weeks or years bokeh after taking a photo .

The multiple layers of depth should give better shots in depth. The Google Pixel portrait mode calculates only for two layers of depth, the subject and the background, so that the entire background is uniformly blurred. However, it is not the depth of field that works. With 1200 layers of different depths instead of two, the elements farthest from the camera may be blurred and the closest elements may be less blurred. HMD said that it had to partner with Google to make it work in Google Photos because it really pushes the boundaries of Google's GDepth format with so many layers.

There are also a lot of fun things in the camera software. Reduced photos can be saved in RAW DNG format before being overwritten in lossy JPG format. You can therefore upload the RAW file to a photo editor and have enough information. HMD is associated with Adobe to create a camera profile for the Android version of Lightroom, so you can develop photos accurately, right on your phone. HMD also offers a new Pro Camera user interface on the Nokia 9, allowing exposure times of up to 10 seconds (you'll definitely need a tripod), fast-motion photography and more. many settings in manual mode.

Of course, none of these specifications and information can answer the real question about the Nokia 9: are five cameras really better than one? Putting five cameras on one device is expensive, so HMD will really have to justify that decision with amazing images. Will this new crazy camera configuration really give better pictures than the competition (Pixel 3)? To answer that, we will have to wait for a revision unit.