Nokia Lumia 1020 Summary

Nokia's , however, has excellent lossless cropping if you take photos within the Pro Cam app. I was able to continually zoom in on an item until I could see individual stitches in a textile and blades of grass in a field. Of course, editing photos after the fact isn't as simple as taking them close up to begin with. Settings and controls Apart from high-resolution images and the larger sensor size, Nokia's manual camera controls are a high point. In practice, using them is a little complex, and sometimes frustrating because they're more limited than you'd expect. The Lumia is bereft of preset modes in the default Nokia Pro Cam app, which isn't great you have to switch camera apps or add lenses, and the camera doesn't handle extreme close-ups well in automatic settings.

However, the sliding controls are convenient for creative snaps, if incomplete. There's no way to adjust the aperture, for instance. Samsung has more manual controls, which you access through an Expert mode. That's a small part of the setup, though, since you can also turn on presets like night mode, action shot, landscape, and -- one of my favorites -- food mode. On-screen settings and icons also make it simpler to toggle the Zoom's front-facing camera; Nokia's Pro Cam app makes you go to the settings for a selfie.

One area where the Lumia excels is in loading up the camera in the first place. Press and hold the shutter button and it'll snap open the camera app, even if the phone is locked and asleep. Not so with the Zoom. You'll have to go through the unlocking process before pressing the shutter button to wake the app, though you can set shortcuts on the home screen to unlock to the camera app.

Another setting will open the camera when you power up the phone. Although both phones have physical buttons to open the shutter, you can also turn on the camera app through respective software icons. Portability and design The Zoom's upper hand with its optical lens comes at a cost. Its shape as a point-and-shoot poorly masquerading as a cellie makes it the most outrageously awkward smartphone I've ever tried to carry around.

I also wish they would focus a bit on video too, for some reason video doesn't get enough attention from phone makers and even reviewers. Privacy Policy.

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Log in Don't have an account? Sign up now Username Password Remember Me. Lost your password? Exynos Cortex-A9MP4 at 1. WCDMA I'm not sure why there's no onscreen control for the front-facing camera; digging into the menu just seems like an unnecessary step. It's also a little strange that there are two buttons for reviewing your photos.

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One reviews the last shot you took, the other lets you get at your whole photo stream. Unfortunately, you can't swipe to the left as you can in the phone's native app to access your camera roll. There are cursory editing tools you can access when you review a photo, including rotation and a sort of cropping tool that changes the aspect ratio to , , , and I wish that Nokia had included a more robust suite of editing features here.

Instead, you'll have to swap to a different editing app if you want to crop or auto fix.

Luckily, the makes this fairly easy to do from the settings when you access photos through the review strip. To test how well the Lumia backs up its claims of photog greatness, I shot dozens of pictures with both the Pro Cam app and the native app, using a combination of automatic modes and fancier settings.

Full disclosure: I'm a completely casual photographer, so my photos here represent the perspective of an average user. Many pictures I took looked fantastic in terms of color, contrast, and detail -- especially fine detail like a visible background cobweb.

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When an image was focused correctly, the camera's lossless digital zoom also produced terrific detail, just as Nokia promises. I never took a bad photo with the That said, not every photo was a complete hit. Of course, even good cameras can take the odd bad picture if conditions are off. Sometimes, I wasn't sure that another high-end smartphone couldn't have taken the photo just as well. Edges usually appeared sharp to my eyes, but then some centers sometimes lacked shadows, detail, and depth.

I also had a hard time nailing great portraits. Lighting was sometimes off, and faces often appeared a tinge out of focus. That can cause problems when taking photos of a group. Overall, my photos of objects were a lot more beautiful than my pictures of people. James and Josh had much better luck with portraits; photo enthusiasts should take my results with a grain of salt.

I also noticed that the seems to color-correct a couple of seconds after taking a picture. When using the flash, photo color also grew warmer, yellower, which can be a little weird. Then again, yellow is better than the blue cast you sometimes get when taking photos with a flash. Since the Pro Cam app saves pictures in one small and one large resolution, the camera takes longer to reload. Instead of shot-to-shot times about 2. I will say that I got some terrific pictures of objects even in the Pro Cam app's automatic mode.

Nokia Introduces Lumia 1020 with a Whopping 41-Megapixel Camera

That and being able to crop in tight on an element without losing detail definitely made me want to take a lot more photos than I normally would. Unless otherwise specified, the following pictures were taken using automatic settings, and have been resized. To see more of what this camera can do, check out this Lumia photo gallery and a camera showdown between the Lumia , Samsung Galaxy S4, and iPhone 5.

New cameras, longer battery life, Night Mode, a goofy selfie feature and a price drop The big-screen Pixel 4 XL is nearly identical to the Pixel 4, which includes the excellent Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy , which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion.

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