Nokia 9 PureView: Perform Like Beauty With Beast

Nokia 9 PureView: Perform Like Beauty With Beast

Introduction

The Once and Future King of mobile photography - the PureView camera - is back! Nokia's champion has lived through the twilights of Symbian and Windows Phone, to be once more reborn within the peak of Android era. HMD's Nokia 9 is that the bearer of the next-gen PureView snapper, and it isn't one, but whole six of them!

The next PureView phone was within the rumors for years and yet it didn't come to pass. But it wasn't dead, it had been lying dormant somewhere in Nokia, and later - HDM's labs all this point - and now it's available for purchase.

The Nokia 9 launched within the heat of the smartphone photography war and it seems already before the competition - while others are adopting the triple-cam setup and Huawei pushing the quadruple, Nokia is already before the sport with the primary hexa-camera on the rear.

Don't get that excited just yet. Albeit there are six snappers, not one among those is wide or telephoto. That's because the Nokia 9 PureView isn't targeting the casual user - but the photography enthusiasts who are already wont to shooting RAW on their digital cameras and would welcome an equivalent experience on a phone. But more that new camera during a minute.

The rest of the Nokia 9 specs aren't as cutting-edge. The phone boasts a 5.99" OLED screen of QHD+ resolution, a final year's Snapdragon 845 chipset with 6GB of RAM, and a 3,320 mAh battery that will not last it an entire lot.

Other aspects of the phone are more up-to-date. It features an in-screen fingerprint scanner and a 20MP selfie snapper capable of pixel-binning for improved low-light performance. It also boots the newest version of Android One - Pie and it's an IP67 rating for water and mud resistance.

Nokia 9 PureView Specs

• Body: Gorilla Glass 5 back, 6000 Series aluminum frame, 8mm thickness
• Screen: 5.99" p-OLED display QHD+ (2880 x 1440px), HDR10; Gorilla Glass 5
• Chipset: Qualcomm SDM845 Snapdragon 845
• Memory: 6GB RAM, 128GB built-in storage
• OS: Android 9.0; Android One
• Rear camera: 3x 12MP f/1.8 Monochrome + 2x 12MP f/1.8 RGB + 3D ToF camera; 4K@30fps and 4K HDR video
• Front camera: 20MP F/1.8 with Tetracell pixel binning, which mixes four pixels into one pixel in low light
• Battery: 3,320 mAh; Quick Charge 3.0, Wireless charging (up to 10W)
• Connectivity: Cat. 16 Gigabit LTE (1024/150 Mbps), Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC, USB-C port
• Misc: IP67 rating, In-display fingerprint scanner + 2D face unlock

The Nokia 9's PureView camera has five 12MP modules with an equivalent fixed focal distance of 28mm along side a ToF camera. The output of all cameras is combined into one for a supposedly stunning image with unmatched dynamic range. Lossless zoom is on the table, too. This all sounds promising, but those trying to find the flexibility of the various focal ranges that other manufacturers are offering could be disappointed.

The last year's chipset is additionally a small setback albeit the Nokia 9 is far cheaper than the other newly released flagship. Okay, perhaps it isn't as cheap because the Xiaomi Mi 9 but it's still competitively priced. Whether HMD did not have the time to implement the camera complexity onto a replacement chip or it had been something else - we cannot know. But the Nokia 9 is pitched as a edition, which suggests the longer term of the PureView camera is hanging within the balance and therefore the Nokia 9 will tip the scales a method or the opposite. Let's hope HMD's risks do pan out.

Unboxing the Nokia 9

The Nokia 9 retail bundle has all the essentials - an 18W charger, a USB-C cable, and a pair of in-ear headphones with the great ol' 3.5mm jack. Since the Nokia 9 doesn't have an analog audio port, HMD is additionally proving a 3.5mm-to-USB-C adapter. We’ve to admit this is often the primary time a maker ships a smartphone, flagship at that, with a headset which will always require an adapter and that we find this odd, if not lazy.

Display

The Nokia 9 PureView features a 5.99-inch P-OLED display with QHD+ resolution and 18:9 ratio. Having such a high-res screen and 538ppi density the Nokia 9 has the means for seeing all those photos crazy the PureView camera fully glory.

The screen is protected by a Gorilla Glass 5 and has no cutouts whatsoever. There are noticeable bezels at the highest and bottom, but those should be an excellent place to rest your thumbs while taking shots with the PureView camera, so we cannot hold them against the Nokia 9.

So, the Nokia 9 screen looks quite bright and our display test confirms it. When assail Auto, the screen radiates 727 nits of brightness, while the utmost manual brightness you'll achieve with the scrubber in settings is 530 nits - all great numbers for an OLED screen.

The minimum brightness we measured on the Nokia 9 display was just 2.1 nits. The daylight contrast on the Nokia 9 PureView is stellar and it did set a replacement record in our all-time chart a bit like the primary 808 PureView did back within the day.

The screen of the Nokia 9 has four Color modes - Basic, Cinematic, Vivid and Dynamic. The essential corresponds to sRGB gamma, the Cinematic is DCI-P3, Vivid boosts the colours over Cinema, and Dynamic is that the default setting that changes contrast and color saturation counting on the content and ambient light.

The average deltaE we measured for the screen on Basic mode against sRGB is 4.8 with a maximum deviation of seven .5, which isn't the simplest accuracy, but still a really good one. On Cinema mode we measured a mean deltaE of 5.1 against the DCI-P3 gamma and a maximum deviation of seven .8.

Battery Life

The Nokia 9 is powered by a rather modest 3,320 mAh battery. The great news is that the PureView supports both wired and wireless fast charging. The phone ships with an 18W-rated charger, which replenishes 50% of its dead battery in half an hour. It takes almost two hours for a full charge, though.

The Nokia 9 posted an endurance rating of 79 hours, which is about the typical for a Snapdragon 845-packed smartphone. It’s excellent scores within the 3G call and video playback tests, and an honest one for web-browsing. The typical standby performance however accounts for the stellar final endurance score in our test.

Still, the screen-on-times (SOT) are pretty good - you'll use it for 10 hours of web browsing or 13 hours of video playback.

Speaker

There is one speaker on the Nokia 9, and it's at rock bottom. It posted a really Good score in our loudness test. Unfortunately, the audio quality is quite poor - it lacks in both highs and lows, and sometimes it can sound like an old radio. We have seen less expensive phones do way better and that we really felt like HMD has saved a buck or two with this speaker.

Audio Quality

The Nokia 9 PureView did splendidly within the active amplifier a part of the audio output test, getting the standard excellent scores and really impressing with its super high volume levels.

Headphones did a good amount of injury to the stereo quality, but the output wasn’t affected in the other ways. And as long as the loudness was among the very best we’ve seen lately, we’d call this a superb showing by the 9 PureView.

A Total of Six Cameras Sit on The Rear of The Nokia 9

The PureView camera is back with a bang! While today the triple setup is close to become the new norm, Nokia is much ahead as far as we are counting snappers - there are a complete of six cameras on its back.

So, there are five 12MP cameras on the rear, all sitting behind f/1.8 Zeiss lens. Two of these are RGB, and therefore the other three are monochrome. There’s also a sixth camera around - a ToF one - for extra depth information. A dual-tone LED flash is that the final thing you will see at the rear.

Those five camera lenses have an equivalent fixed focal distance of 28mm. you will not find an ultra-wide angle or telephoto snappers, and therefore the Nokia 9 doesn't brag with any fancy shooting modes. The PureView was never intended to be the world's most versatile smartphone camera but to deliver brilliant image quality on par with an upscale full-blown camera. So, how does it happen?

The phone combines the pictures from all five 12MP cameras, sometimes even multiple frames from each of these, into one image with a spectacular dynamic range - up to 12.4 stops of difference in light which is the maximum amount as an outsized sensor camera. So overall, the PureView promises unmatched scene depth detection and spectacular dynamic range.

The Nokia 9 was also meant to serve best those that wish to tune their photos in post processing - especially photography enthusiasts who already process their camera photos from RAW anyway. RAW files offer you far more headroom for opening up shadows, bringing back highlights, and applying just the proper amount of sharpening and noise reduction.

Nokia says they've worked closely with Adobe to completely support editing data from the pictures taken on the phone. This will be wiped out the free mobile version of Adobe Lightroom. It doesn't come pre-installed but is obtainable as a further download during the initial setup.

Nokia has also partnered with Google in order that Google's Photos app could natively support photos crazy the Nokia 9's five cameras. Google Photos is in a position to regulate the focus after taking the photo, adjust the quantity of bokeh, and can be ready to display the full-size RAW files - which are DNG.

Thanks to the sheer amount of camera sensors and therefore the ToF camera, Nokia says that this setup can produce a way more detailed depth map of the scene - for more convincing defocusing. The phone gathers up to 1200 layers of depth data (as against only 10 on most phones) for up to 40m faraway from the camera. This suggests we should always see far more realistic bokeh in photos, the blur would gradually be stronger the further that a part of the scene is from the camera. The depth info is stored within the photo and Google Photos will allow you to vary the quantity of defocusing after the shoot.

The video a part of the camera isn't as exciting, but the fundamentals are covered - it can shoot 4K HDR videos at 30fps. There’s no optical image stabilization, while digital one is out there only shooting fully HD.

Now, let's check the Nokia's camera app because it is that the only piece of custom software on this phone. Luckily for us, and you, it has been improved since the previous Nokia phones, though the left side of the viewfinder remains overcrowded with various toggles.

The camera app is ready-made for swiping between the shooting modes, how that the iPhones pioneered an extended time ago. The available modes are Square, Panorama, Monochrome, Bokeh, Pro - left (or down) from the default Photo, and Video, Slow-mo, Time-lapse right (or up) from Photo.

While within the Photo mode you will get many toggles on the other side of the shutter key - motion (a.k.a. live photo), depth information, beauty, single/dual/P-I-P (for combined front/rear shots), timer, flash, and Settings (you can choose RAW+JPG from here). the professional mode allows you to pick one among five white balance presets, focus manually, choose ISO (100-3200) and shutter speed (1/500s-10s), or set exposure compensation (-2/2EV fully stop increments).

Final Thoughts

The long-awaited Nokia 9 is finally here, and for a few, this might desire a historic moment. The brand has undergone through various changes and turmoil over the years, and yet it's here to remain. And under HMD's leadership, it had risen from the ashes once more albeit it isn't the brilliant star that when was. But what better thanks to join the high ranks with another PureView phone?

If done right and therefore the new PureView phone clothed to be a game changer, then it might are the rocket propellant Nokia needed to succeed in the celebs another time. But the phone could also fail, and rather than a slingshot, it could find yourself being a sinkhole. And it's like HMD was scared of that and pitched the Nokia 9 PureView as an edition phone.

And this is often probably the simplest decision HMD has made about this phone. Because it won't pay off, including put the corporate on the thanks to glory. The Nokia 9 camera system has either been implemented very poorly or sure to become obsolete even before it's become mainstream.

The image quality by the Nokia 9's automatic processing is anything but groundbreaking. In fact, it's quite behind compared to what the present and even last year's flagship phones can do with one camera and multi-image stacking. And do not get us started on the low-light image quality or the video quality generally.

You can get great images from this phone if you shoot in RAW and have the patience to attend for his or her saving then manually edit every single one among those RAWs in Lightroom. But the thing is that the majority of the competing flagships can shoot in RAW also, which suggests you'll do this on the other popular phone - be it Huawei P30 Pro, Galaxy S10, or an iPhone. But those competitors also offer optical zoom, and/or wide-angle cameras, among many other cool photo and video modes.

So, the Nokia 9 PureView is perhaps the foremost niche smartphone you'll find on the market immediately. It targets one specific group of photography enthusiasts, which can or might not plan to give its RAW potential an opportunity, pun intended. And it’s lower cost and therefore the wow factor of the multi-camera setup is that the only thing giving it a fighting chance.

The Competition

The Nokia 9 PureView isn't that expensive at €650, but there are similarly priced phones which deserve your attention better. Just like the Huawei P30. It’s a shocking design, an outsized OLED screen, and a flagship-grade and versatile camera which will match the Nokia 9 output in daylight and smash it within the night scenes.

The Galaxy S10 is simply €50 quite the Nokia 9, and yet it offers a far better and bigger screen, a more powerful chipset, and a triple-camera with optical zoom and an ultra-wide angle lens. it is also far better when it involves shooting videos, offers stereo speakers, a microSD slot, and even a 3.5mm audio port. What's to not like?

Finally, you'll also get an arguably better affect the Xiaomi Mi 9. It's almost €200 cheaper than the Nokia 9 but still features a lot to supply. The Mi 9 packs an outsized AMOLED screen, the foremost current Snapdragon 855 chip, and yet one more triple camera with regular, zoom, and wide-angle snappers. And therefore the camera experience is basically good.

The Verdict

The Nokia 9 is filled with potential, but the failure to utilize it's evident in every aspect of the phone. We will easily forgive the previous generation of hardware due to that fantastic screen and lower cost, but the camera didn't live up to the promise and expectations.

Maybe Nokia had an excellent idea thereupon six-camera setup, but until it had been able to show it, everybody else both came up and launched a far better one. And rather than that legendary and industry-leading camera, we see smudgy shimmers of what the Pure View branding once stood for.

The Nokia 9 has the facility to shoot great photos, but to urge them - you would like to form peace with some occasional hiccups and know your RAW file processing to urge the stunning results that were promised and shown at launch. But here's the thing - this phone is way from being the sole one which will shoot RAW.

Pros

• Flagship-grade high-res OLED screen with HDR video support
• Water-resistant design
• Excellent image output from the RAW files (requires time and skill for processing)
• Part of Android One program so timely updates are expected
• Rather cheap for a flagship

Cons

• Uses last year's Snapdragon flagship chipset
• User experience with the fingerprint scanner is poor
• Buggy software, freezes and crashes happen often when using the camera
• No microSD slot, while shooting RAW+JPG eats storage quickly
• The default JPEG and video output isn't flagship-worthy
• The camera's prolonged image processing is tedious and takes a toll on battery life