41MP Camera Review: Nokia Lumia 1020 PureView, Sample Pictures and Videos

Video Recording - Daylight, Night and Comparison

Video Recording

Recording a video on Lumia 1020 is just straight forward with no hefty amount of features to play with as we had while shooting. You start recording and that’s it. What you can do during the recording is the zooming in and out. Lumia 1020 records videos on up to 1080p at 30fps, which is just parallel to the competition.

We’ve seen OIS – optical image stabilization’s performance  in Lumia 1020 for low-light still shots but its equal performance – I’d say more of it – in video recording, when it holds the frame smooth along panning on the scene. Specially when zoomed-in, the smooth movement of the frame is just better than digital video stabilization in any smartphone camera. Additionally, you feel the performance of the OIS right when you are recording. You feel comfortable recording with Lumia 1020.

Another important factor we talked during the still photos was the PureView zoom. Again in video recording, Nokia didn’t allow zooming more than what doesn’t destroy quality of the picture. You can zoom into 4 times closer. With the same concept of oversampling, in video recording 1080p video holds the oversampled image data from the full resolution of the sensor giving amazingly sharp quality and detail with impressively reduced noise. So when you zoom in to 4x, the video recording still brings the image quality with no loss of pixels as it’s exactly the 1920x1080px crop from the full sensor. In typical video recording digital zoom upscales the pixels to magnify the field of view within the initial resolution hence loose image detail.

In a video what else important is the audio recording. Nokia had already impressed us with the rich recording implementation since Nokia 808 PureView. It’s really commendable when compared to other smartphone video recordings. Crystal clear voice with no background noise and distortion-free sound recording. It’s really rich.

Finally what we noticed was again a little bit over-saturation in bright colours but they feel nice any way. A control over it would have been appreciated but unfortunately there is not a single control while recording other than zooming. whatever, that’s a software part, and we expect Nokia/Microsoft to work with it.

Following are some sample videos where we had an iPhone 5 meanwhile having the Lumia 1020 so we just added into the circle but don’t take it as a direct comparison as iPhone 5 is not comparable with Lumia 1020’s performance. We hope, we could bring some healthy comparison in later days but can’t promise you that. For now, just take it as an example of how the zooming part, OIS result in the footage and audio performance is different than another smartphone.

What I felt comfortable with Lumia 1020 was the feature to slide up/down to zoom in/out with just a finger while holding it in the same hand. I couldn’t do that on the other phone, you will see zooming in and out in the first recording below only in the Lumia 1020’s side as I could do the same while both of my hands were occupied by them. So the 2nd video was recorded by both pre-zoomed to see the difference. Lastly there is a night video recording while driving, that’s only from the Lumia 1020.

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