Nokia "Zoom Reinvented" Event Confirmed: EOS PureView Likely Star

Nokia has fired out invites for a New York launch event, teasing with the tagline "Zoom Reinvented" in what could be the official reveal of the Nokia EOS PureView. The event, taking place on July 11, will be a chance to "see more from Nokia" according to the invite, and judging by the magnifying glass and the teaser, we'd not be surprised if some lossless digital zoom magic in the manner of the original 808 PureView was on the cards.

That 2012 smartphone – one of the last to run Symbian before Nokia switched wholesale to Windows Phone – used a super-high-resolution sensor to deliver lossless magnification without moving parts. Where usually digital zooms result in lower-quality images thanks to the picture being artificially blown up, Nokia's PureView system started with a 41-megapixel sensor and then cropped sections of the frame out to produce roughly 5-megapixel stills.

Those stills were effectively zoomed in by around 3x, though without any loss in quality. Of course, Nokia also used the 41-megapixel sensor to produce better quality, non-zoomed images, by averaging light data from clusters of proximate pixels and thus ironing out any glitches.

Since then, although Nokia has reused the PureView branding on several Windows Phones – most recently the Lumia 925 – it's always been in reference to other aspects of the photography experience. PureView Lumias have used optical image stabilization, for instance, or introduced extra components to the Carl Zeiss lenses to increase sharpness and brightness.

If the frequent Nokia EOS leaks we've seen over the past few weeks are anything to go by, however, the next phone to get PureView branding will go back to the original concept, and pack an oversized sensor. The in-the-wild images that have emerged certainly suggest that Nokia's photography engineers have managed to trim down the believed 41-megapixel CMOS, however, since it's still a smaller phone than the original 808.

We'll know more on July 11, but this could be the most interesting Nokia in some time, and certainly the most interesting Windows Phone of the moment. The last we heard, AT&T is likely to be the destination carrier for the EOS, hence the NYC launch.