Nokia Lumia 1020 preview: Take two

The Nokia Lumia 1020 appoints two camera apps at work - the default Windows Phone 8 camera application as well as Nokia's new Pro Camera app that's designed to allow for advanced settings fiddling.

Nokia Pro Camera app

Nokia has created a special app for the Lumia 1020 dubbed Nokia Pro Camera and is one of the phone's key software features. It is there to compliment the 41MP camera with a simple user interface that allows users to fine tune the camera settings. It may sound intimidating, but Nokia has done a great job at making the app simple to use for both novices and professionals alike.

Starting the Nokia Pro Camera reveals a familiar interface, first introduced with the Smart Camera app. The important distinction is the top transparent box in the top center containing six camera adjustments. From left to right they are flash, white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation.

Nokia Pro Camera app user interface

Tapping on each of them opens a ring-based interface on the right part of the screen. You can access all of them simultaneously by sliding the on-screen shutter button to the left. This will stack sliders for all six settings next to one another allowing you to easily fiddle with them at the same time. The settings you modify are kept at what you chose, while the others are adjusted accordingly by the app.

As we mentioned earlier, the Pro Camera lens has another cool trick up its sleeve. It snaps two photos at once - one in full resolution and another one in 5MP, which benefits from the pixel oversampling technology, while at the same time being far easier to share. You can zoom in up to 3x for the 5MP photo without serious degrading the image quality (you'll be losing the supersampling but it's still much better than the digital zoom in other phones) and you don't have to make a decision on the spot - you can zoom out and in after the fact and even reframe the photo.

The settings menu gives you neat options

The Nokia Pro Camera app isn't limited to shooting still images, it can also manage video capturing quite well. Tapping the video icon on the bottom gets you to the video part of the app. There you have access to just some of the settings - flash, white balance and focus. The focus can be set to either manual, auto or infinity.

Video recording also makes use of OIS and oversampling. Zoom is enabled even during video capture and it can go up to 4x in 1080p mode and 6x in 720p resolution. The Nokia Lumia 1020 also has two mics (one on top, one on bottom) with the company's proprietary Rich Audio Recording for distortion-free sound recording in loud environments. The 1080p videos are recorded at 30fps, of course.

Shooting video is straightforward

You can start shooting videos by either tapping on the screen or pressing the dedicated hardware shutter key. Pausing video recording is still not an option on Windows Phone 8. Thanks to the dual high-quality microphone setup on the Lumia 1020, the audio quality is very crisp and boasts a lot of detail and texture.

Windows Phone 8 default Camera app

The default Windows Phone 8 camera UI is pretty simple - you have your viewfinder and some controls on the right. From top to bottom they are the still/video camera toggle, front/back camera toggle, a flash mode setting and the Lens button. On the left you have an arrow that takes you to the images taken with the camera, alternatively you can swipe to get there.

Camera app • Camera lens

There's also a slew of settings, ranging from scenes and effects to white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpness and ISO among others. You have a dedicated Macro focus mode but no face detection. The flash can be set to auto, forced or off. A separate setting allows the LED to work as an AF assist light.

In the latest camera software Nokia has raised the maximum ISO setting from 800 to 3,200 and has tweaked image processing in low-light conditions.

SkyDrive is available for photo auto-upload (it's turned off by default), but you can install third-party apps to handle this functionality as well.

Lenses is an interesting feature, allowing third-party camera apps to enhance the core camera functionality without the need to access them separately and get use to their different UIs. The so-called Lenses are like plugins for your camera and they are available directly in the native camera app. They show up in the list of installed apps too in case you'd like to pin a Lens to the start screen, for instance.

The shutter key will wake the phone up with a single press and launch the camera app. You can set Nokia's exclusive Smart Camera or Pro Camera to be launched instead.

So, we've mentioned Smart Camera several times already and it's time to explain what it does. It's the next generation of Smart Shoot and is based on technology developed by Scalado (now owned by Nokia).

It shoots a burst of 10 photos at 5MP resolution and allows you to edit those photos later. When editing a Smart Camera photo you choose one of several modes by swiping through their respective cards, each with a helpful label.

Official Nokia Lumia 1020 Smart photo

The basic feature here is best shot - automatically selecting the best photo out of the 10 (you can manually override the selection). You can also select the best expression for each individual face in the photo.

The multiple photos can be used to remove moving objects as well.

Smart Camera can pick the best expression for each face • or remove moving objects

Then there's Action shot - a moving object is overlaid on the photo several times to create a sense of motion. You can pick which of the 10 photos are used to create the action shot and the multiple copies can either be opaque or semitransparent.

The other mode that enhances motion is Motion focus - it locks the moving object, but blurs the background around it. Imagine turning the camera to track a fast moving object, that's the effect that Motion focus simulates.

Here's a promo video done by Nokia that shows an example use of the Smart Camera

Anyway, Nokia has other Lumia-exclusive Lenses too. There's the Panorama and Cinemagraph (creates animated GIFs), but also GlamMe (to enhance self-portrait shots) and a few more. As of July 2013, the Cinemagraph lens has been updated and now supports 720p resolution for the .GIF files.