SEEING CLEARLY

The five(!) cameras of the Nokia PureView 9 could be a revolution

You know those huge 40-ish-megapixel sensors used on phones like the Honor View 20 and Huawei Mate 20 Pro? Nokia did it first, back in 2012, with the 808 PureView. The PureView 9 is its spiritual successor, but instead of using one giant sensor, it uses five 12MP cameras all snapping together to create absolutely incredible images.

Using similar tech to the Light L16 16-lens camera, the camera setup includes three monochrome sensors and two full colour, which all combine their light and colour information into a final 12MP output. This makes it capable of some seriously cool stuff, the more subtle of which is that it has a huge dynamic range, so you should get more detail from both shadows and highlights than almost anything else.

It also records much more depth data (1,200 layers) than other phones, even those with Portrait modes. Why? So that you can choose which part of the image should be in focus after you’ve shot it. Suddenly, getting the perfect image is a million times easier, because you don’t need to nail it at the time – you can find it afterwards as long as the phone was pointing in the right direction.

We haven’t been able to test this properly, but the examples we’ve seen have been stunning. And it’s not a hard process at all – you can make the changes in the Google Photos app, though there will also be support for its raw shots in Lightroom, for more advanced photographers.

Elsewhere, the phone looks solid for its £549 expected price. You get a sharp 1440x2880 OLED screen with HDR support, a Snapdragon 845 processor, a 20MP front camera, and in-display fingerprint scanner.

Nokia is still committed to its Android One path, which means you get Android 9 with no annoying extras attached.