Juha Alakarhu, Director of cameras (for phones) at Microsoft recently released photos taken on the Lumia 950 and 950 XL on the Windows blog; the five photos shown should spring the majority to ask, are you sure it wasn’t shot with an SLR? Obviously having the company’s optics guy talk to you about how the camera performs isn’t exactly the best way to deliver a product without some favouritism but let’s see the photos first.
While the post was fairly in-depth, it probably explored the parts where the Lumia shined – 5 photos in different lighting situations and highlighting different aspects of the phones cameras’ features. Listing out the bare specs of the cameras;
20-megapixel PureView rear camera
Advanced BSI sensor
F/1.9 Zeiss optics
Triple-LED natural flash
5th-gen optical image stabilisation (OIS)
ISO12800
4K video recording
Going off a limb by saying that the cameras has the same dynamic range as an SLR and “HDR is rarely needed”. Alakarhu adds on another paragraph how the Lumias are unmatched in low-light shots and how much of the difference the 5th gen OIS and large aperture makes in the images. In the low-light shot, two photos are compared, one from a competitor looking extremely grainy/noisy and the other looking much better.
He then talks explains the Rich Capture mode, a feature that takes two exposure moments for the same image – taking in the short for any movements and the long for whatever is stationary. If it works as promised, it’ll allow you to tweak the amount of light in a shot, whilst using flash too. For flashes it’ll take one with and one without, while the three tone flash will appropriately balance out the colour balance to produce a more real life characteristics.
It’ll be hard to say if there was any post-production touch-ups done on these images, though for the third photograph, Alakarhu does state that an external reflector and lighting were used for this image.
Windows 10 will be on these devices, and they’ll have Continuum compatibility once hooked up to the Display Dock, shown here. Time will tell if Windows Phones can resurrect the name of (Nokia) Lumias.
Click here for the full size of the competitor / Click here for full size of the Lumia
Stay tune, cause once its available we’ll probably have another camera shootout together with the Sony Xperia Z5.
