From the article:
What is the best cameraphone available on the market? Does the incredible Nokia 808 PureView sensor mean the end of the DSC era? How fine are full HD videos shot with your smartphone compared to DSC's ones? Here are our answers…
Is a smartphone worth using as a digital still camera?
Like the iPhone 5, most of today’s competitive smartphones sport a camera with a sensor of at least 8megapixels. This is a far cry from one of the world’s first mass-produced camera cellphones, the Sharp-made J-SH04, which had a sensor resolution of 110,000 pixels, or just 0.1-Mpix. Nokia has blown all of these specifications out of the water with its new, bulky, 41-megapixel Nokia 808 PureView.
...the deep knowledge of mobile-specific defects necessary to develop accurate testing protocols for mobile imaging. But we also gave ourselves another challenge when designing DxOMark Mobile protocols, because we wanted to be able to compare mobile cameras with other kinds of digital cameras. And after measuring tens of available smartphones, tablets, DSCs and DSLRs, here are our first key findings:
The best smartphone on the market for shooting still images takes better photos than a 5-year-old high-end compact
Yes, the implausible 41-MPix Nokia 808 PureView sensor is fulfilling its promise, but let us reassure you that it is not outperforming the new generation of DSCs, and that there is a long way to go to attain DSLR image quality (as shown in the following graph):
The Nokia 808 PureView, the best-ranked mobile for taking photos in the DxOMark Mobile database, achieves a still image performance in between that of a 5-year-old DSC and a 1-year-old DSC’s, as summarized by DxOMark Mobile - Photo scores.
Interesting stuff, not least that the DxOMark people have created a metric to clearly rate smartphone cameras. You can subscribe to their future findings via RSS here.