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The new model will be known as EOS, and will launch in the summer in the US.
Observers queried the lack of the 41MP sensor - boasting five times the resolution of most top-end phone cameras - when Nokia launched its flagship Lumia 920 Windows Phone handset at the end of 2012 - although the phone does confusingly boast a camera technology also known as Pureview.
The 41MP sensor debuted at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona in February 2012 on Nokia's final Symbian phone, the 808. The resulting images drew rave reviews at the time, though in fact the aim of the sensor is not to produce huge images, but good images in low light.
Low-light images taken at high ISO ratings (where small amounts of light are registered) typically have a lot of "noise" on them – random speckles of visible colour - caused by increasing sensitivity of the CCD sensors in the digital camera.
The aim of the 41MP sensor is to oversample the image; the actual size of pictures taken on the 808 is about 5MP, but each pixel can be determined from the information provided by the redundant pixels, thus eliminating much of the flawed data.
The 808 also uses a bigger sensor, which means bigger pixels. Nokia explains in a white paper (PDF) that pixel size has "shrunk just over the past six years from 2.2 microns, to 1.75 microns, to 1.4 microns … The smaller the pixel, the less [sic] photons each pixel is able to collect. Less [sic] photons, less image quality. There's also more visual noise in images." (One micron is a millionth of a metre.)
The latest Nokia Lumia 920 comes out with a floating lens technology, which is actual optical image stabilization - a first for a smartphone.
