Nokia shows off 41-MP camera phone

The cameras in our phones have been getting better over time; 5-megapixel and now 8-megapixel cameras are commonplace in high-end phones today. Although I've seen some devices that were really cameras with phones built in (instead of the reverse), the problem has always been getting good quality images into a thin smartphone.

Nokia recently took what, to me, was an unexpected move: It added a 41MP sensor to its new PureView 808 smartphone. The result is a camera that takes better pictures than other smartphones and, in some ways, better pictures than the vast majority of point-and-shoot cameras. The company showed poster-sized prints of images taken with the phone camera which looked incredibly vivid.

I was curious about how this actually worked in practice, so Nokia's Ari Partinen walked me through the device. The phone has a 1/1.2-inch sensor, which is notably larger than the sensors in other phones and indeed much larger than what you'll find in compact cameras. The