Nokia’s Lumia 1020 is official, and it’s a beast — although not in the way you would expect, as it’s rather slim and lightweight, especially when compared to the device that preceded it, the 808 PureView.
The 1020 is the first Lumia device with true PureView technology with its whopping 41-megapixel sensor, although we can tell you that the sensor here isn’t quite as big as the one on the 808 PureView — a sacrifice that Nokia made in order to ensure that the size of the device didn’t grow too much.
Our first impressions with the Lumia 1020 are that this is a great camera, whilst also doubling as a great phone. It’s not too big so you don’t have to worry too much about it sticking out of your pocket, although we admit it’s not quite as thin or lightweight as say, the iPhone 5.
We didn’t see too much of a size difference in the real world between the existing Lumia 925 and the Lumia 1020, despite the almost 2mm difference in thickness.
The screen on the Lumia 1020 is different to the one on the 920, doing away with the LCD display and replacing it with a much more vibrant 4.5-inch AMOLED, although this isn’t 1080p.
Nokia has also gone through the process of removing all the curves from the screen in order to improve the viewing angles — something that’s very much evident when you see this screen from the side.
What’s really new here is the brand new Pro Cam app which is installed as standard on the Lumia 1020 — but don’t worry, you can change that to either the Smart Cam or default Camera app.
The Smart Cam has also been approved, gone is the downsampling to 5MP, although you will still get downsampled images when shooting with Smart Cam.
Speaking of downsampling, one of the Lumia 1020’s special features is the ability to two images at once, an amazing 41-megapixel shot that can be cropped and reworked at your leisure, and a 5-megapixel shot which uses oversampling to create a photo with what Nokia calls “Super Pixels.” What that means is that your 5-megapixel image will be a compressed image where 7 pixels worth of the 41-megapixel image have been changed into a single pixel.
We’ve had only a small amount of time with the Lumia 1020 but we’ll, as always, be putting it through its paces in a full review later.
Enjoy perusing our hands-on gallery below.
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