Nokia 9 PureView Smartphone Review

[Redaktion]

HMD Global went the extra mile with their brand-new Nokia 9 PureView flagship and equipped it with a total of five lenses for the main camera in order to achieve superior image quality. And it is not just the camera, the rest of the device features even more high-end hardware. Find out in our review whether or not the Nokia 9 PureView lives up to its own expectations.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nokia-9-PureView-Smartphone-Review.418191.0.html

[Hans Nordland]

I'm a photographer and have worked with many DSLR and MF camera's. When I read about the Nokia 9 Pureview, I was curious, and, as I needed a new Android phone anyway, ordered it. My wife has a Huawei P20 Pro, the 'dXomark special'. I also had 2 other camera's around, a Canon DSLR 550d, and a Leica S, a medium format. I used all 4 devices in a comparative test, with portraits, landscape, macro - to see if my gamble was worth it, and whether I would be better off returning the Nokia for say a Huawei. My conclusion was, that the Nokia delivered images both more sharp ('clear' would be a better word), and appealing. With portraits, the Nokia rendered skin-tones far more natural and better than the Huawei - almost comparable with the Lecia. Black & White (monochrome) images in RAW are very appealing on the Nokia. Low-light photography is a 'mixed bag': sometimes good, sometimes awful. And true: the Huawei is capable of 40MP RAW; the Nokia only 12. The Huawei P20 (&P30) Pro have far more capabilities. But my (personal) impression is that the Nokia is preferable because it is 'special' (and better) in the limited capabilities that it does offer. So I would like to just add an alternate opinion to the review which is somewhat dismissive about the camera capabilities.

[stefanve]

Update with April security patches are just released, apparently there was a one time issue with several Nokia phones. Google and HDM worked together to fix it. The patch also has big fixes for the camera, system and beter display calibration.

The JPEG are pretty ugly most of the time. But the raws have a lot to offer. If you take photos just to share via WhatsApp or any other medium that uses havy jpeg compression this might not be the phone for you. That being said the phone has probably the best camera at the moment. The dynamic range is amazing and comes really close to something like a rx100vi. All in all in like the phone, it is fast , clean and capable of natural looking images

[hey]

Somebody forgot the translation on PROs and CONs....

[S.Yu]

Yeah, no improvement from the leaks, this is Adobe's HDR DNG achieved with simultaneous exposures instead of sequential exposures. There's less of an alignment issue but low light performance isn't notably better, and the hardware goes to waste shooting mere JPG.