With a Nokia hire, Apple’s excellent iPhone camera may get even better

One of the senior engineers on Nokia’s PureView camera team is headed to Cupertino. While Nokia has many patents on the PureView technology, Apple could gain some imaging expertise to help make a great smartphone camera even better in future iPhones. While the world is tuned in to Apple’s rumored Beats Electronics purchase, perhaps more focus should be put on the iPhone’s popular camera. Why? Because Apple has hired Ari Partinen, one of the senior engineers responsible for Nokia’s PureView camera technology. Partinen tweeted out his career move on Friday, which was reported by Engadget.

PureView is what Nokia calls the camera technology that debuted with the Nokia 808 in 2012. That model was more of a concept device, running the company’s older Symbian operating system. Nokia paired a massive 41 megapixel image sensor to a floating, five-element lens in the Nokia 808, and that setup found its way into various Lumia handsets running Windows Phone starting with the Lumia 1020. The Lumia 920 with PureView tech actually arrived prior to the Lumia 1020 but used a smaller image sensor.

In addition to unique hardware elements and optical image stabilization, PureView also provides lossless zooming through software: The massive image taken on a PureView camera can be cropped and zoomed many times over with no lost of picture quality. These two images from PocketNow illustrate the zooming; note the detail in the second image, which is a crop of the first.

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