You might have seen the Nokia-produced images comparing the Lumia 920 and another unknown smartphone. You might have also heard that they were just representations of the quality difference the the Lumia 920 can achieve with its optical stabilization. Today, at Photokina in Koeln, I was able to see it with my own eyes and I can tell you, Nokia are not lying. The OIS feature on the Lumia 920 enables shutter speeds down to the 1/4 second range without blur and helps create amazingly stable videos.
The Low-light test shown in the video used a dark-box of still-life.
Here’s the image we took in the video with the Nokia 808 which doesn’t have optical stabilization. F2.4 1/8th, ISO 800. It’s dark, fairly unusable. Taken on automatic settings.
I took this with my Panasonic Lumix FZ150 which has optical image stabilization. F2.8, 1s, ISO 800. The FZ150 is a high-end bridge camera, one of the best.
Here’s a screen capture of what we saw on the Lumia 920. Take a look at the video and you’ll see the Nokia Lumia 920 bring up an amazingly bright and stable image. (I wasn’t allowed to take a copy away!) The Lumia 920 has an impressive F2.0 lens and this image may have used a high ISO but the shutter speed must have been down at 1/4s or longer for this.
In the second part of the video you’ll see the optical image stabilization in action during video. It truly is way way ahead of any software stabilization you’ll find and again, I would put it in the same quality class as my Lumix FZ150. It makes you wonder what would happen if Nokia were to put a 41MP sensor together with the OIS feature. (By the way, the Nokia 808 camera is just too big for this type of OIS so don’t expect the combination in a phone any time soon.)
One note on the demo in the video – the playback you see was not the video taken with the rough hand shaking. However, I did view the video taken with the hand shaking and the stabilization was very impressive. There were elements of movement in the edges of the video though. We did a second video with normal hand-held movements and it was as stable as the playback you saw in the video.
Enjoy the video and let me know what you think of the Lumia 920. Is it on your list? It’s on mine! Price, launch date unknown apart from the same ‘Q4’ as we heard before.
Lumia 920 Sensor below, 808 PureView Above.
Awesome stuff! The release date just can’t come soon enough!
well… why he doesnt show the video in which one he shaked his hand?!
See my notes in the article.
Update: I’m going back to Photokina to get you guys a ‘pure’ version of this. Give me a couple of days and i’ll be back with a new video.