You may have read our previous article about the Nokia 9 Pureview: a brand new smartphone with a whopping FIVE camera lenses on the back. This futuristic looking gadget is one of a kind in its market, so we decided to take it for a photo diary test run.
In this case, we’d normally be using our Canon DSLR’s and Sigma lenses to shoot a street style diary. However, due to the Pureview’s outstanding functions – including the ability to change ISO/aperture/shutter speed, save in RAW and, of course, the five camera thing – we thought we’d do a little comparison shoot.
We love a phone with a good Bokeh mode, so we hopped onto this function straight away. Comparing the two photos below, both are crisp, clean and vibrant, capturing excellent detailing in the green leaves. The first, without Bokeh, is a spectacular image. The second image with Bokeh is blurring out the background in order to create a “depth of field” effect that you would get with a low aperture on a DSLR. While on a small screen (on a phone), the second picture looks very flawless, on a desktop you can see where the blurring doesn’t quite finish right on the subject (suss the blinds next to Mel’s hair and right arm).
With the five lens shooting, the Bokeh blur tool can actually be customised. After all, your phone has taken five images and stitched them together to create the one picture, so it would make sense that you can play around with layers. While this picture has been blurred automatically and un-edited, a little post production magic can fix this. However, it mostly wouldn’t be necessary if only for social media use considering these small details are barely visible to the eye on a phone screen. See the Instagram image here.
We continued to shoot as normal, swapping between regular phone mode and Bokeh. The phone picked up light wonderfully and there was natural vibrancy to the pictures we took, which meant little to no post production fiddling. Auto Bokeh was not perfect at all times, would sometimes blur parts of the subject as you can see on Kristen’s black blazer in the second image below. It worked a lot more effectively when the subject was closer but, again, for perfectionists who can notice this, all it would take would be a little on phone editing to fix. We’ve noticed this is also quite a common occurrence across board for any kind of phone that offers Bokeh too, so it’s nothing really major.
Pop into the in-built ‘Phone Editor’ and you’ll find some super funky options, including ‘Parallax’ which creates this weird moving zooming video thing of your image. It’s actually really funny and we kind of love it. Another great tool, you can remove the Bokeh blur entirely if you end up hating it. It’s true that sometimes Bokeh effect on phones can be really fake and odd looking, so sometimes it’s a job best left to the DSLR depending on your subject, the lighting and the context.
It’s worth to mention, these are some suuuper high quality images. We’re talking roughly 10MB each for the Bokeh pics. So, keeping this in mind, you’ll want to have a lot of space capacity on your phone. The Pureview comes with a generous 128MB, but it won’t be difficult to fill if you are a major shutterbug like we are! We’re backing our pics up on an external hard drive incase somehow we magically manage to fill up our storage in the short time we’ll be trialling this test model.
The final note we’d make is that this phone is running with some impressively powerful software, especially integrating the RAW function, making it a really incredible tool for all content creators and photographers out there. This also means that the photos will not save at the click of a finger – you need to be patient for your phone to stitch the images together over a duration of a few seconds. You may also not be able to use such high-functioning tools when on low battery, as Kristen did try once and the phone was unable to save all her images when her phone was close to it’s deathbed.
