Nokia 1020 (41mp) vs Nikon D800 (36.3mp)

I would first like to start off by saying that this was by no means a scientific test. I just wanted to prove a point that megapixels do not matter.

A friend of mine recently got the new Nokia 1020 phone. This phone is famously sporting a 41mp camera!

If you think about it for second… 41mp! That’s a crazy amount of megapixels, let alone a crazy amount for a mobile phone! The average DSLR nowadays is ranging between 16-24mp on both crop and full frame. The Nikon D800 was making waves when it first came out with its incredible 36.3mp sensor.

I know it’s not a fair comparison and that no-one is really having troubles deciding between the two, but I did want to compare image quality of the Nokia 1020 against the Nikon D800, just for the hell of it!

I have only tested briefly with a random shot in my local town of Wimbledon. I only chose this spot as it was the most well-lit area in my local town.

Because the Nokia does not have any aperture controls and it is a fixed f/2.2, it cannot be a direct comparison once more as my Nikon D800 was fitted with a 24-70mm f/2.8. So I could not close down the Nokia’s aperture, nor open up the Nikon any further. In fact, to match the Nokia’s 1sec exposure as much as possible, I had close down the Nikon to f/3.5, and even at that I found I needed to reduce the exposure in LR a further -0.60 to match.

After white balancing the D800 as close as possible to the Nokia’s files and then matching the 1920x1080 crop, here are the final results.



There is a slight difference in angle as the Nokia was mounted on top of the Nikon D800.

Overall, at a glance, I don’t think many people will notice the difference.

Zoom in 1:1 and you’ll see that the Nikon is much sharper. However when zoomed out to fit the image on screen, I don’t think anyone would be able to separate the two in terms of sharpness.



The key difference between the two images is the Dynamic range. The entrance to the door way to Morrisons on the Nokia is almost completely blown out, whereas the Nikon has still retained some detail.

Likewise for the Christmas lights, as the Nokia has made the lights seem much brighter in comparison.

After pulling all the highlights down, I managed to pull back even more detail from the shop Windows in the D800 file, however the Nokia was just beyond recovery.



That is down to the fact I am working with a D800 Raw file against a Nokia JPG, however as standard, the RAW file is revealing far more detail than the Nokia, and the Nokia is a processed file which naturally should have highlights pulled down and shadows pushed up a bit.

Overall, I am very impressed with the Nokia 1020 and its photography abilities.

Ideally I would like to control its aperture settings so I could do longer exposures, as anything above 1sec was over exposing the image. However if the Nokia 1020 was my mobile phone and I just so happened to be out without my camera, I would be quite happy to whip out this Nokia for some Night Time Cityscapes.

After all, “The best camera is the one you have with you”.