Nokia Lumia 920 vs Apple iPhone 5: the Lumia 920 win in stabilization shootout

Several days ago, a job ad posted by Nokia on employment network LinkedIn sees the company looking to hire a senior engineer to work on new mobile devices and software, people naturally think Nokia is consider to shift toward Google's Android operating system, which have a dominate share in the smartphone market. But according to a recent twitter from Doug Dawson, who heads up the company's media relations, he says Nokia will not shifting toward Google's Android operating system, and the job ad is only for HERE Maps support for other platforms, including iOS and Android. In order to found its way to get a successful comeback in the smartphone market, Nokia’s new Here Maps for iPhone and iPad launched in the App Store on Nov 19,2012, as Apple also release its own Maps after the iPhone 5.
Now let’s come back to Nokia’s new camera smartphone, once mentioned Nokia’s Flagship Windows 8 phone, we will think of its Lumia 920, which have an unparalleled Camera with PureView Technology. On October 28, 2012, I have compared the Lumia with iPhone 5 in aspect of price and top specs, etc. Today, I will update the comparison on the camera between Nokia Lumia 920 and Apple iPhone 5.

As all we know, Nokia made a pretty big deal of the stabilization feature of its Lumia 920 smartphone, which captures an impressively smooth clip even with exaggerated hand shake. The handset comes with the Floating lens technology, which is real optical image stabilization, as opposed to the digital solution of its competitors.

Update: We saw there’s some confusion so we felt we should clear this out. The two smartphone were attached to a stand, rather than being held in two hands as that puts them on equal footing. The test itself starts with some casual panning, which is followed by walking in place and jumping.

Naturally, we were very curious to find out how big a difference the new technology makes, and tech website gsmarena decided to pin the Nokia Lumia 920 against the Apple iPhone 5 (which has the most efficient digital video stabilization we have seen so far). The result show as below:

The results were somewhat surprising –You can see for yourselves in the video below. Don’t forget to go fullscreen and select the 1080p option.


Above the video, the difference isn’t really major at first glance – each of the two super phones has its moments of superiority in the video. You’d probably find a difficult to tell which one uses optical stabilization and which one is simply employing a cleverly designed software algorithm, If we hadn’t named the two halves, don’t you? However, for its stabilization to work so well, the iPhone 5 is forced to use only the central part of its sensor, while the Lumia 920 can use the whole thing, which gives it both a wider viewing angle and the option to do pixel binning, which helps fight digital noise.

So the Nokia Lumia 920 takes this round, even if the margin of its victory is smaller than we anticipated.

Of course, this is just one scenario and the optical image stabilization might turn out to be more beneficial on other occasions. Website gsmarena will do some more tests before the review is complete so we’ll know how good Floating lens actually is.

For personally, I like the Lumia 920 very much and prepared to buy one as Christmas Gift. So what is your opinion? I am very curious to know your thoughts about this. Welcome to leave your opinion if you are fond of this article.