What little appears there gets largely averaged out in the 5MP output, which is of course the point. Noise is well controlled, even in the full-res files. Nokia appears to apply a firm but judicious amount of sharpening to the 5MP file so that edges are crisp, but not overly so. Details are clean, clear and present, even in darker, low contrast areas that look smeary at the pixel level on most competitors. The unzoomed, downsampled 5MP versions, while obviously containing less detail, look better than phone camera output studied at native resolution on screen usually does. Even at a 100% view on a screen, there’s a lot of usable detail at maximum resolution. Is it fair to say that they contain less detail than the output of something like Samsung’s 13MP S4 when they’re really the distilled goodness of so much image data?ĭespite concerns about fair apples-to-apples comparisons, it’s indisputable that the 1020 captures a phenomenal amount of detail in good light at low ISOs. Of course, that won’t stop us from doing it. Pixel-peeping a 38MP image is going to tell you something, but it won’t have much to do with real-world image quality. At the pixel density of a 40-inch HD TV, you’d need a screen nearly 11 feet wide (2.5 meters) to display the whole image at native resolution. At 300 dpi, it would print 24 inches (60 cm) wide. To be clear, pixel peeping a 38-megapixel phone camera image is insane. It’s a little hard to know how to judge the 1020’s image quality. In really low light (tripod territory) setting the manual focus to infinity is a good idea. As usual, it’s a bit slower in low light, but accuracy is good: focus errors are very rare.

Once you’ve got a capture app fired up, focus acquisition is competitive but not as snappy as the best. Here, the standard Windows Phone app does better, kicking over in about two seconds. Unfortunately the Pro Cam isn’t too quick on the initial draw either, taking four to five seconds to launch (cold start or warm). If the phone can’t chew while it’s cutting its next bite, there’s bound to be some lag that could only be addressed by intense computing horsepower. The fact that the 1020 can take a burst of 10 shots at a reasonable clip with the Smart Cam app hints at a possibility for better performance, but it’s likely that in that case the image data is dumped into an enormous buffer and then processed when the burst is complete. The Nokia's dual-core Snapdragon processor makes for smooth and snappy operation.

Picopix 1020 review