Originally posted by BigMackCam I have to say, that's very nice image quality from a phone camera. I'm not sure it's 41MP nice, but it's very good indeed. And not dreadfully over-sharpened like so many phone camera photos. I'm impressed!
I believe that 808 is still the best camera in the mobile phones. It was kind of no compromise proof of technic project at the time. Phone itself is already thick, but still it has a huge hump in the back due to large sencor and optics needed to support that. Modern phones are just too thin to compare.
But like I said the idea of huge Mpix count was not to improve image quality, but to provide losless zoom, and for that it was a great solution. Desired final output size defined how much zoom you had availeble. Fully zoomen in you used 1:1 pixels and the center of the lens. Zoomed out phone downsampled image to reduce noice.
Also you couldn't use all the pixels from the sencor as it was build to provide 3:4 and 9:16 formats. I think the actual pixels were 38 & 34Mpix or something like that.
The previous model Nokia N8 was already on the level of point & shoots of that time: