The Lumia 1020 as a Landscape Camera

I've had this Lumia 1020 sitting on my desk since a summer development project. I needed a Windows Phone for the Development bid and the Lumia 1020 advertised itself as a camera-first sort of phone.

As a camera, I quickly found the Lumia 1020 to be largely a disappointment.   The commercials show people shooting their kid's plays from the back row, touting the digital zoom afforded by the 40+ megapixel sensor.   

But, in practicality, the shutter was laggy, the metering was slow and inaccurate.  Of people, you were left with huge jpegs of often blurry or noisy faces.    My son won't sit still enough for this camera, except for when he sleeps.

I did find a use for it, however, on the telescope.   Bolting the Lumia 1020 onto the eyepiece of a telescope, I could get good results using the very nice features of the Nokia Camera app's timer and bracketing modes. 

At the end of the year, Nokia gave it's followers a late Christmas present with the release of the Nokia Black, Windows Phone 8 update.    Along with a ton of strong features to the OS and usability, the update added support for Camera RAW with the Lumia 1020 and others.

With this addition of RAW support, I'm finding new uses for the Nokia 1020 as a nice little pocket landscape camera.    The shutter's still a bit slow for shooting kids, the shadows are still a little noisy and getting the RAW files out of the camera/phone isn't seamless but all said, I think the addition of RAW redeems the Nokia 1020 as a camera, for me.

But for the average user I'm willing to bet the 40+ mb files that are hidden on the filesystem will pose more of a problem than a solution.

Still, I applaud Nokia and the Windows Phone team for adding camera RAW to a smartphone.