Camera shootout: Nokia 808 PureView vs Apple iPhone 4S (pictures)

Nokia's new flagship Symbian handset packs a whopping 41-megapixel camera, which is larger than the shooters found on most advanced compact cameras. And now that we have our hands on a review model, we wanted to see how it fared against the iPhone 4S.

Since it would be impossible to evenly compare photos shot with the 808 PureView at full resolution (there are no other 41-megapixel camera phones), we chose an 8-megapixel resolution to match that of the iPhone 4S. Keep in mind, though, that the Nokia handset uses a "pixel overlay" technology in which seven pixels are combined to form one pixel in a photo. The company claims that this keeps "virtually all the detail, but filter(s) away visual noise from the image." For more on how the phone works, read Nokia's white paper (PDF).

Here's a sample shot of a photo wall at the Nokia office. The two cameras seem to perform equally well in terms of noise and white balance.

Click here to view the images at full resolution. Note that these are the original pictures that we obtained from the iPhone 4S and 808 PureView and were not compressed or edited in any way.