The 808 beats the Olympus PEN E-PL2 in a blind test

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GSM Arena have been putting the Nokia 808 and a number of other contenders (including the N8, HTC One X, Galaxy S III and Apple iPhone 4S) through a set of 'blind tests', asking over a thousand people to vote on the anonymous photos and crops. The blind test also included the well respected 4/3" Olympus PEN E-PL2 camera and it's rather remarkable that the Nokia 808 PureView's images romped home as a runaway winner even over the PEN device.

Here's the concluding piece from the blind test:

Quite a lot of people got their guesses correct this time, but it's hardly a surprise - the 808 PureView has quite an advantage over its smartphone peers in terms of resolved detail and processing, so it's easy to tell its pictures apart. In fact a lot of people couldn't decide which photos came from the Nokia cameraphone and which from the Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera, which is a huge compliment to the Nokia camera division on its own.

Votes

  • 570 - Nokia 808 PureView
  • 243 - Olympus PEN E-PL2
  • 56 - Apple iPhone 4S
  • 39 - Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III
  • 5 - Nokia N8
  • 0 - HTC One X

The numbers are quite clear - Nokia has really managed to create something special with the 808 PureView. Matching the Micro Four Thirds camera in terms of image quality would have been impressive enough, but beating it is simply stunning. We did expect the Nokia 808 PureView to trump its smartphone competition quite easily, but the fact that it was voted best performer by more than twice the number of people that chose the the E-PL2 was a bit surprising even to us.

Aside from the way the 'votes' were counted, the N8's low position was almost certainly down to its 12mp photos being artificially downsampled to 8 megapixels to make the test 'fair' to the others(!). In any case, the main point of interestis at the top, with people voting for their favourite photo. The 808 proved, yet again, that it's not only the best camera phone ever made, it's out in front by such a margin that it's arguably a very serious challenger to an awful lot of standalone cameras.

Source / Credit: GSM Arena