HMD is bringing its latest flagship phone - the Nokia 9 PureView - to Australia this week. If you want to get your hands on the trypophobia-inducing handset with five rear-facing cameras, the Nokia 9 PureView will be available in stores from May 9 for $1,099 outright. You'll find it in JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman, and anyone who gets in early will get a bonus pair of wire-free Nokia earbuds valued at $199 (which will definitely come in handy, as the phone has no headphone jack).
While most other multi-camera smartphones use their additional lenses to add functionality such as zoom, HMD has taken a different approach with the Nokia 9 PureView. The lenses are purely used to capture more detail.
The camera array is made up of five 12MP sensors. Two shoot colour, and the remaining three shoot monochrome. When you take a photo, these lenses all fire simultaneously, shooting at different exposure levels. 15 photos are then stitched together to get your final image. HMD says this gets you 12.4 stops of dynamic range, which is similar to what you’d get with a pro cinema camera.
In lay-terms, dynamic range is the difference between the darkest element of a photo and the lightest. The wider the dynamic range, the more vibrant and detailed your photo looks. Extra dynamic range also gives you more flexibility when editing a photo with tools like Snapseed and Lightroom. You're even prompted to install Lightroom during setup.
The Nokia 9 PureView camera setup can also capture more depth - 1,200 layers of information according to HMD - which can be used to create more realistic bokeh in photos. There's also a Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor to help with this, which many manufacturers - such as Huawei and OPPO - would count as an additional camera.
Other key specifications for the Nokia 9 PureView include a 5.99-inch 1080p+ display, a Snapdragon 845 processor, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of non-expandable storage, IP67 water-resistance, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and a 3,320mAh battery. As with most Nokia devices, the Nokia 9 runs Android One (based on Pie) which means you’ll get at least two major operating system upgrades and three years of security updates.
We've been playing a local Nokia 9 PureView for a couple of days now and our initial impressions are a little mixed. The camera can certainly get stunning shots that are among the most detailed we've seen from a smartphone, but you definitely need to put in a bit of editing work to get the most out of your images. The sheer amount of data captured by the Nokia 9 PureView also means there's a delay between when you take your photo and when you can view the final result, which seems to increase when you take multiple photos in succession. We'll have a full in-depth Nokia 9 PureView review soon.
Alex Choros
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