Nokia Lumia the best smartphone for photography

When you bought your smartphone, was the quality of the camera a consideration? No? We thought not. If the camera quality were the deciding factor, everyone would be carrying the Nokia Lumia. It is the king of the phone cameras and this month it became even more regal in its specifications.

The rollout of the latest operating system for the Nokia Windows phones, called Black, brings with it the capability of recording images RAW in all their 41-megapixel glory.

The RAW mode that Nokia has sensibly chosen is Adobe's universal digital negative format, DNG. This is the icing on what was already an impressive cake. The Nokia can now record in 38 megapixel jpeg (depending on the aspect ratio), five megapixel down-sampled jpeg, or DNG.

The Nokia camera module, created in collaboration with Zeiss, includes a larger than normal sensor, a six-element f2.2 lens, with image stabilisation achieved by moving the entire lens assembly barrel. Because of the extraordinary pixel density, digital zooming is possible either in camera or in computer processing, without loss of detail up to at least 3X.

In default mode the camera is fully automatic, but there is a panel of controls on the screen for manual over-ride of flash, white balance, ISO, exposure compensation, focus and shutter speed. The controls are set by a simple finger drag around a semi-circular ''virtual'' wheel.

Late last year the company released the Nokia Refocus app, which works by rapidly taking a set of pictures without worrying too much about focus because the critical sharp point can be selected later in the computer.

Also provided with the Windows phone is Microsoft's Photosynth, which creates a virtual reality image from a mosaic of overlapping photos. These are merged in either the camera or computer to form a 360-degree panorama.

Does all this technology make for better photos? Yes, it does. The resolved detail captured by the Nokia is astonishing. Using the RAW mode at maximum resolution permits post-capture zooming and reframing that is not possible with other smartphones.

At full resolution there is some image noise evident, which is easily corrected in the RAW conversion processing.

With conventional phone cameras, digital zooming is achieved by interpolating image elements where none exists, guessing what should go where. With the Nokia, digital zooming is simply cropping and reframing the image and discarding unwanted pixels.