From the Nokia N73 to the 808 PureView

From the article:

I recently shared some of the first shots by Damian Dinning and his Nokia Lumia 1020. Damian is former Lead Program Manager Imaging Experience at Nokia and had to leave the company last year for personal reasons. He had been working at Nokia's imaging department for nine years and was instrumental in the development of Nokia's smartphone cameras from the N73 and N95 (the one that really got me hooked on smartphone photography).

I didn't just find his shots with the Lumia 1020 on his Flickr account – all the shots from the "old" phones were there too. Pre-PureView so to say. Fascinating. So I asked for his permission to share them here at the club, and if he could add some of the Nokia 808 PureView on Flickr as well.

After he did so, I made a large selection of 45 shots in total – and you know what? I'm going to share them all here. Because I can :-) All the formats chosen are 640 pixels wide. If you hover your mouse over the shot you'll see with which smartphone it was taken. If you click on the shot you will be taken to the original as offered by Damian on Flickr.

Nokia N73, shots from 2006

My first encounter with the N73 was in the context of a camera comparison with the N90 and, unsurprisingly, the latter won in my view, but the N73 was also a great imaging device for its time.

Here's another pick from the article:

Nokia N86, shots from 2009

Ah yes, my beloved Nokia N86, I still pick this up with fondness. It's main weakness is the use of dual LED flash rather than Xenon - I think if it had had the latter I might still be using it today as a smart camera, since the device is tiny and surprisingly feature packed.

Back to the selections:

Nokia N8 "during development", shots from 2010.
Maybe these shots are the most "spectacular", since they show the result of the N8 in the process of finalizing the device. The results from all the work must have been absolutely breath-taking back then (in fact, it still is…). And to realize that no-one really knew about it. Can't imagine how exciting that must have been.

To be honest, the 2010 Nokia N8, in terms of imaging, can still hold its head up against the giants of today - iPhone 5S, Galaxy S4, and so on. The only device to exceed the N8's all round imaging capabilities is its own successor, the ground breaking Nokia 808.

And, what do you know, Marc has picked out some lovely 808 photo samples too. Here's my favourite:

I'm a sucker for a good dandelion shot! You can see all 45 selections here in the original article.