Nothing beats optical zoom

Nokia has introduced a very interesting new phone, the Nokia 808 PureView, with a camera sensor with a whopping 41 Mpixel. Those pixels are not used to create a ridiculously large 41 Mpixel photo, but are combined (‘pixel binning’) to create better image quality. They are also used to enable a new kind of digital zoom, without having to use interpolation techniques. When zoomed-in, the camera uses a smaller part of the sensor, but it also combines fewer pixels, so the result is an enlarged view with the same number of pixels or only slightly fewer pixels. While this technology is very interesting for cameraphones, because there is no room for optical zoom lenses, this is not a true alternative for optical zoom. An optical zoom lens allows you to use the entire sensor surface, independent of the zoom. This new digital zoom still uses a smaller part of the sensor when you zoom in, so even though no interpolation occurs, it does not mean that there is no penalty in terms of image quality.