Nokia: In the near future camera phones will be better than a DSLR; HD recording in 12 months

Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki, while delivering a speech in Helsinki, told an audience that camera phones will soon rival professional cameras. Nokia will “revolutionise the market”, and heavy lenses will no longer be needed. All this is expected to happen in the “very near future”. Not very concrete, and loaded with marketing speak if you ask me.

What’s more solid in terms of information is this quote: “It will not take long, less than a year, when phones can record HD quality video and you can transfer it directly to your HD television set.”

You heard it hear folks, by this time next year should should have a mobile phone capable of capturing 720p, maybe even 1080p, video and outputting it to a television, preferably via HDMI. The only 2 handsets on the market that I know that can do that right now are the Samsung i8910, and the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. Both are super expensive, are difficult to find, and quite buggy. There are rumours that the next iPhone will have HD video recording, but we’re not going to be able to confirm that until the end of June.

What about the leaked Nokia N8, will that have HD video recording? We certainly hope so.

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

Someone

Also, the Galaxy S and the HTC Evo 4G do 720p recording, if I am not mistaken
Stefan Constantinescu

Yes they can, but they’re also not shipping yet.
Anonymous

More important than the resolution is the image quality. I really hope they have something that can actually live up to his promises – nothing else can so far.

In fact, the only way I see this happening is if they manage to produce some kind of variable shape lens. Otherwise the size will just increase to the size of a normal camera.
pho

You forgot MotoROI (Motorola’s South Korea Android handset) which can capture 720p.
pho

Add Samsung Instinct HD too.
anttik

Anssi should lay off the crack pipe.

Sure you can record even UHD 8K 3840×2048 pixels material on a 1 pixel sensor, but it still won’t resolve more than one pixel.

The über best of high end professional full frame 35mm digital cameras with video in it (Canon top end models) resolve 700 lines.

That’s 65% of the total the 1080p maximum HD resolution.

A pocket digi cam with a 1/1.6 large CCD sensor will resolve near 500lines.

The best camera phone will resolve somewhere along the lines of 200-300 lines.

That’s after the crappy lens (plastic, glass or liquid), small and crappy lo-power sensor (not even backlight CMOS), after a multitude of image degrading real-time crappy algorithms and a very low bitrate crap video codec.

There is NO way within the laws of quantum physics that the best of camera phones (pocketable) could ever approximate anywhere near the resolving power of the best of digicams. Not even the best pocket digicams. Professional DSLRs are in a totally different league.

Sure you can cram a 500000 gazillion pixel sensor in there, but if each sensor will not get more than an occasional photon every now and then, then the only thing you are “recording” is quantum noise – not the image itself.

Anssi clearly needs to take a basic course in physics or at least have a PR guy who removes the most outrageous blunders from his public speeches.

But what more would I expect from a marketing droid?
james

Kinda forgetting about the Sprint Evo 4G that is to be released in the next 4 weeks or so, it can record at 720p and has HDMI out.
Sachin Gaur

We had yesterday Anssi visiting us for a lecture in TKK. He was telling us that they have a HD camera as small as 1 cubic cm in lab conditions. Which, coincides with you news.

However, the theme of lecture was more about predicting future. He was showing us slides from 1996 that how they could predict iPhone back in 1996 and how he relates to his statistics background in adoption of technology.

He believes that age of a generation is 25 years and it takes almost 12 years for any new thing to be adopted massively.