A pair of photos posted to the Flickr account of Microsoft’s Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore appear to be the first real-world samples taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020. Rumour has it the photography-oriented phone will be announced at an event in New York on Thursday. From what we can see in these images, the camera could be incredible.
The EXIF data on the photos reveals that the forthcoming phone will indeed be called the Nokia Lumia 1020. But there are still a lot of questions. The metadata doesn’t quite tell us whether the 1020 will have the same (or similar) 41-megapixel camera as last-year’s PureView 808, making it the Windows Phone version of that wonderful, wonderful camera.
What do we know? Well as The Verge points out, the two photos have slightly different resolutions (2947×1658 and 2352×1568), which isn’t all that surprising. You’ll note that those numbers don’t multiply out to nearly 41 million pixels, but the data reveals that the photos have been processed in Adobe Lightroom, so these pixel counts aren’t necessarily what the phone’s camera shoots natively. One interesting hint in the metadata is the f/2.2 lens aperture which is a touch faster than the f/2.4 aperture on the PureView 808.
Here’s what’s certain: these photos are crazy sharp. Just look at that photo above — that’s a great-looking shot from a cameraphone. Is this the beginning of something new and exciting? We’ll have to wait until later this week to find out. [Flickr, Flickr via The Verge]