Find: The first few hours with the Lumia 1020’s camera

Zooms great. And don't forget that downsampling makes for less noise and better low light pictures. 

This is better than people realize. 

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The first few hours with the Lumia 1020's camera

Thanks to UPS shenanigans, I've only had our Lumia 1020 review unit for a few hours. I'll have a full review up in due course, but during these few hours, I've had a chance to do the thing the Lumia 1020 is really designed for: taking photographs.

I took some pictures this afternoon with the Lumia 1020, a Lumia 920, an iPhone 5, and a DSLR, my Canon 50D. For the most part, I used the default apps with the default settings (occasionally I suppressed the flash explicitly, but otherwise left it automatic). The DSLR was in programmed mode, where it picks the best combination of aperture and exposure time. It had the flash permanently disabled, as the built-in flash casts a shadow with the lens I had attached, and I didn't want the extra bulk of my external flash..

The Lumia 1020 was configured to generate two pictures each time: a full resolution image (coming out at around 33.5 MP with 16:9 framing), and a resampled 5MP image. Outdoor pictures were largely taken in the brutally harsh Houston sunlight.

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